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David Elfassy IM’d me yesterday and asked me to play a game of word association. I hate word associations. It seems that word associations always lead to people thinking I am insane, and I get locked in padded rooms.   Anyways, he said it would really help him with some Exchange materials that he is working on, so I agreed.   David: SAN optimization. (First word that comes to your mind) Russ: Banana (I was hungry and was reaching for a banana)   David: You *&(%$__*(&*(@#** – (wow, that was rude)  🙂 Russ: Cheerios (what else do you say to that?) … Continue reading Exchange Q&A with David Elfassy

Greg Page of the Microsoft Cluster Group and I had a mini-discussion today on the microsoft.public.windows.server.clustering newsgroup, as well as followed it up with a phone conversation, regarding the implementation of the MSDTC resource. In the past, Microsoft has clearly stated that the MSDTC resource and its dependent resources should be in their own cluster group separate from the default cluster group that contains the quorum. The reason behind that is that in the past, read: NT 4.0 clustering days, the MSDTC could consume enough disk time that the quorum would not be able to read/write to its disk, and it … Continue reading MSDTC and Server Clustering – Revisited – Original Posted Mar 24, 2005

I got brave and decided to fix the problem. The issue, for those who missed the first show, was that I needed to reconfigure the MSDTC on a SQL cluster. The MSDTC needed to be moved to a different drive because we are retiring one of the EMC frames. The more I read on this the more complex it seemed. I read through Q 301600 and Q 294209, and reviewed several other sources. These articles made it sound like I was going to have to rip out DTC on each node and then rebuild it on each node and restart … Continue reading MSDTC Issue Part 2 – Original Posted Feb 1, 2005

More like, it is semi-broken. Ok, it isn’t broken at all, but it isn’t configured the way I want it configured so I have a desire to fix it. It all started last Friday night. We are migrating from one EMC frame to another one. The storage guys (they really do a great job here) added new LUNS to the SQL cluster. We then added the drives as resources in cluster admin and then put the drive resources into the proper SQL cluster groups. We shut down the SQL services, did a quick file copy to the new drives, changed … Continue reading MSDTC Issue – Original Posted Jan 26, 2005

Whenever I teach Exchange Server 2003 classes, I get to the module that discusses clustering and I want to scream. There just isn’t enough material to discuss Exchange clustering properly. Anyways, I started talking more and more about clustering as there seems to be a great deal of interest in clustering Exchange in many organizations. So, here are some of the more common questions I get when discussing Exchange Server Clustering.   Q1. If I have two nodes in the cluster, do the mailboxes exist on both nodes? A1. Microsoft Server Clustering uses a shared nothing architecture. In this architecture, resources … Continue reading Common Exchange 2003 Cluster Questions (Top 11 List) – Original Posted May 1, 2005