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using multiple email servers

some members of the mom community have expressed an interest in using multiple smtp destinations for failover in case one or the other becomes unavailable. to my surprise, the people complaining have been mail admins! now in order to have failover, you have to have at least two instances of something running. so going on that assumption, you could do either of these bullets...
  • bring up a load-balancer and put your smtp servers behind it. mask the name or IP to something virtual.
  • create multiple entries in dns with the same name. point each record to a different mail server. poor man's load-balancer using round-robin records.

Comments

  1. I am a mail admin, and I have complained about this because MSFT said it was something they were going to include on MOM 2005 (back when it was MOM 2004). I suppose this just didn't make it to release. We don't use NLB, don't want to use NLB, I'd like there to be the option in global settings for TWO SMTP relays. A primary and a secondary. Kind of simple really, and not asking to much imho. Nonetheless, being a NTAC I guess I will have to make due with what I got. Thanks Marcus for posting this work around that is not viable for my environment. ;o)

    /hugs and kisses

    Secret Admirer

    P.S. your MVP picture is HAWT!

    ReplyDelete

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