Now that Exchange Server 2010 has had its first birthday, it's a good time to remind folks about the built-in features for high availability, site resilience and disaster recovery in Exchange 201...
Published Dec 16, 2010
Version 1.0
Blog Post
Dageeza,
With respect to your questions regarding upgrading CAS members in a load balanced array, you should be following these steps (note I wrote these for RTM to SP1, but same steps apply for rollups):
PREREQ: Do not upgrade any mailbox servers to SP1 before all CAS within the AD site are upgraded to SP1.
1. Drain stop X (RTM) where X is a number of CAS members such that you don't impact current CAS array load (e.g., if you have 6 CAS members in the LB array and designed the iimplementation such that you can survive 3 simultaneous CAS failures, then x=3 or less).
2. Take X servers out of LB pool after verifying all current connections have been terminated.
3 Upgrade x servers to SP1. Verify upgrade is successful.
4 Drain stop y (RTM) servers (where Y = total number of CAS members in LB array - X) and add X (SP1) servers back into the LB array.
5. Confirm all connections on Y (RTM) servers have been terminated and then remove Y (RTM) servers from LB array.
6. Upgrade y (RTM) servers to SP1. Verify upgrade is successful.
7. Add y (SP1) servers back to array.
Ross
With respect to your questions regarding upgrading CAS members in a load balanced array, you should be following these steps (note I wrote these for RTM to SP1, but same steps apply for rollups):
PREREQ: Do not upgrade any mailbox servers to SP1 before all CAS within the AD site are upgraded to SP1.
1. Drain stop X (RTM) where X is a number of CAS members such that you don't impact current CAS array load (e.g., if you have 6 CAS members in the LB array and designed the iimplementation such that you can survive 3 simultaneous CAS failures, then x=3 or less).
2. Take X servers out of LB pool after verifying all current connections have been terminated.
3 Upgrade x servers to SP1. Verify upgrade is successful.
4 Drain stop y (RTM) servers (where Y = total number of CAS members in LB array - X) and add X (SP1) servers back into the LB array.
5. Confirm all connections on Y (RTM) servers have been terminated and then remove Y (RTM) servers from LB array.
6. Upgrade y (RTM) servers to SP1. Verify upgrade is successful.
7. Add y (SP1) servers back to array.
Ross