Introduction

The availability requirements for messaging and collaboration servers have increased drastically over the years, with the result that these servers are now among the most mission-critical servers in the datacenter. Several recent reports have concluded that e-mail is more important to end users than their phones. So it s not rocket science; it s in the interests of you as the Exchange Administrator to achieve as high an uptime as possible. Each of these facts played an important role when the Exchange Product Group developed Exchange Server 2007, so it s no surprise that when speaking of high availability as well as disaster recovery, we can find many improvements as well as new functionality in the Exchange Server 2007 product.

Exchange Server 2007 includes three primary high-availability solutions relating to the Mailbox Server role, although one of these features isn t really new at all but has instead changed name and been further improved since Exchange Server 2003. We re referring to the Single Copy Cluster (SCC) functionality, which is a clustered solution that uses a single copy of a storage group on storage that is shared between the nodes in a cluster. Those of you with just a little bit of Exchange cluster experience would say that the SCC solution is similar to a traditional Exchange 2000/2003 active/passive cluster setup, and you re right.