Messaging systems are mission-critical components for many companies. However, circumstances such as component failure, power outages, operator errors, and natural disasters can affect a messaging system's availability. To help prevent against such circumstances, it is crucial that companies plan and implement reliable strategies for maintaining high availability. As an added benefit, a highly available messaging system can save money by providing consistent messaging functionality to users.

Whether you are deploying a new Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 installation or upgrading from a previous version of Exchange Server, this guide will help you plan and deploy a highly available Exchange Server 2003 messaging system. Many of the high availability recommendations in this guide are related directly to the planning recommendations in Planning an Exchange Server 2003 Messaging System. Before using this guide to implement your high availability strategy, you should first read Planning an Exchange Server 2003 Messaging System.

Following Topics are elaborated here:

• Introduction to the Exchange 2003 High Availability Guide
• Understanding Availability
• Setting Availability Goals
• Making Your Exchange 2003 Organization Fault Tolerant
• Planning a Reliable Back-End Storage Solution
• Planning for Exchange Clustering
• Implementing Software Monitoring and Error Detection
• Questions to consider when developing Availability and scalability Goals.

Download Exchange 2003 High Availability Guide