Domain topology & Exchange server thread part 2!

[rakem]

Ok so after some good advise from guys in here and after some research we are going to change our domain structure. Remember me? im the guy with the 7 seperate domains. see link Here to previous thread.

So im a virtual environment i have created ONE domain name, called central.local, i have added two other DC's to the domain, so there are now three DC's in the one domain.

I have created three sites (in AD sites and Services) put a server in each of those sites and made all three server global catalog servers too.

i have reinstalled exchange and got it all working and everything, however i have been doing some redundency testing, when i shut down one of the DC's exchange goes a bit physco, alot of the featues dissapear and i get errors. So my question is do all three DC's in different sites need to be online for exchange to function properly?

Also in sites and services the replication is set as the <automatically generated> ones that appear automatically, do i need to setup new AD connections and create my own replication method or is it fine to uese the automatic ones?

thanks.

[chilifrei64]

You should only need 1 dc for exchange to run. Now, if the DC that goes down is at the same location as the exchange server than that can cause a minor hicup. Now this also assumes that you have made all DC's(1 at each site) a Global catalog. If one goes down and there are no other global catalogs, then you will run into problems.

As far as the automatically generated.. you can leave those.. it is not necessary to change those.

[fizban2]

Could you post some of the errors that you are getting, also as chilifrei had mentioned is the DC that you shut down also the DC running exchange?

[cluberti]

Exchange is configured by default to look at one DC for a few things, and if that DC goes down you will have issues. There are ways around this, but I agree with fizban2 that we'd need to see some logs to determine more where the problem may lie.

[rakem]

right i will get the exact error messages later today, all dc's in every site are a global catalog server too.

Exchange is not running on a DC it is its own server which is just a member of the domain.

[rakem]

Ok the error is 'Naming information cannot be located because: specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted, contact your administrator to verify the domain is properly configured and is online'

Also there is this one from the Exchange System Manager 'The RPC server is unavailable'

I only get this error when the first DC that i configured is shut down, i can shutdown the other two DCs fine and everything works.

[cluberti]

Right - because Exchange is configured to use that DC for it's configuration data. You'll probably need to configure it to query the other two to make things redundant. I would recommend downloading and running the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer from the Microsoft site, as a start, and follow the instructions (well, most of the instructions ) given by the tool after it analyzes your environment.

The RUS DC workaround is documented here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=294792