Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Adminstrator's Companion

E-mail is a mission-critical application that is used by employees every day. Customers are interacting with your company more and more by e-mail. Employees expect to log on at all hours of the day to send and answer e-mail. And with the increase in flextime and telecommuting, e-mail has become the central way in which many employees communicate. If you need to be reminded about the importance of e-mail, just ask yourself what happened the last time that your email system went down. It wasn't pretty, was it?

If all of this rings true for you, then you should read this chapter. If you pass this chapter by because you don't have a server cluster in your environment, you might very well miss a tremendous technology that could make your e-mail system much more reliable and stable. As you'll see, Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server extends clustering to combine multiple virtual servers into a single solution.

We think that clustering will be more strongly considered as an important network function once IT professionals understand the new features and enhancements to traditional clustering technologies. This chapter will help you understand those features. It also describes how to install and work with Exchange 2000 Server in a cluster environment.