As replication is used for the Mailbox server role only, how do you ensure that the remaining roles are backed up properly in your Exchange backups? Let’s talk about how to achieve high availability in the remaining server roles. Providing high availability for the Client Access, Hub Transport, Edge Transport, and Unified Messaging servers is for the most part similar:

* Client Access Server—Deploy multiple client access servers and use Network Load Balancing (NLB) to provide high availability.

* Hub Transport Server—Resilient by default due to the fact that all Hub Transport servers are registered within AD. You can achieve high availability by deploying multiple hub transport servers.

* Edge Transport Server—Deploy multiple edge transport servers and use DNS MX records to achieve high availability.

* Unified Messaging Server—Deploy multiple unified messaging servers and place them into the same dial plan so that the VoIP gateways can retrieve a list of servers within the dial plan. Configure VoIP gateways to round-robin calls to ensure high availability if a unified messaging server is down. This is important for Email and file archiving.

Once you have a reliable Exchange backups plan that meets your RPO, RTO, and SLA requirements, and you have the ability to test that backup to ensure reliability, you need to move on to the last part of the fast recovery plan—finding out both how to recover Exchange from exchange backups quickly and ensure you have what you need in your environment once Exchange is recovered. The next article will explore this topic and consider recommendations for recovery in Exchange Server.

… Excerpted from Backup Methods Available for Exchange by Ron Barrett (published by Realtime Publishers).
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