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Rabbit23_116296's avatar
Rabbit23_116296
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 10, 2013

Exchange 2010 F5 active-active deployment question

Hi All

 

 

This is my first post. I recently posted a question on the MS Exchange forums and people there feel pretty confident what I want to achieve is possible but would like to know more from a F5 / network perspective.

 

An excerpt from the link below to what I'd like to achive:

 

We have two VERY highly connected data centres. We have 2 AD sites at the moment. This means 2 CAS arrays.

 

We have 2 DAG clusters spanning AD sites and 2 NLB CAS arrays.

 

Would like to move to a single AD site with F5 HW load balancing, benefits are:

 

1. no more waiting 15 minutes for AD replication, RPC instant replication

 

2. layer 7 aware load balancer, if a service is down the load balancer will actually know about it

 

3. No need to worry about different versions of activesync and their ability to figure out the new CAS array with autodiscover

 

4. No more message to the end user when their database is activated cross site telling them to restart outlook

 

Now - the question is really to do with what can we do on the network to make this happen? if I lose DC1 how can I have traffic then go solely to F5 in DC2

 

 

Thanks!

 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...a40704c9a/

 

microsoft
partner

4 Replies

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  • Michael_Koyfma1's avatar
    Michael_Koyfma1
    Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
    May 10, 2013
    You simply need to deploy F5 Global Traffic Manager which will be monitoring DC/service availability at each location and direct users to the appropriate location by resolving their DNS requests to the proper location.
  • Rabbit23_116296's avatar
    Rabbit23_116296
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    May 10, 2013
    I presume the GTM would be an external service? If so, is there anything we could do for internal traffic? I am not concerned with RPC traffic hitting a client access server in any data center, the latency and speed is such that the end user wouldn't be the wiser.
  • Michael_Koyfma1's avatar
    Michael_Koyfma1
    Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
    May 10, 2013
    GTM does not have to be external - it can easily serve both external and internal needs from the global availability and intelligent monitoring and traffic steering perspective.