I have the following scenario - Main Data Center contains Exchange 2007 SP1 CCR cluster running on Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 SP2 - IP-Based SAN Replication is running between EMC Celerra NAS units replicating the LUNs used by Exchange from the production NAS to the DR NAS In the event of a disaster, would it be possible to use the Setup /m:RecoverServer on a stand-alone server at the DR site to restore Exchange if I had LUN copies from the CCR cluster at the main site? Or would I have to stand up a MNS cluster at the DR site and use use Setup /RecoverCMS? Would it be easier to just set up SCR and not use the LUN based replication? Thoughts?

You would need a windows failover cluster in the DR site to be able to recover with setup.com /RecoverCMS. Setup will be checking for the cluster nodes. As for the question of what would be easier, that's up to you. I find SCR to be easier, it requires less domain knowledge on my part.

If you use a storage replication solution then the storage vendor is your first support contact especially if it is an asynchronous replication.If you use SCR then you use a Microsoft provided application built-in solution.

CCR nodes if using 2003 then both nodes in main site and SCR in DR site , its perfect solution and simple to setup , need help setting up let me know Regards, SAlman Gilani

It would be easier to setup SCR and why not use the log replay replication which is provided in Exchange 2007 as a SCR instead of EMC lun based replication. Microsoft support is also available in case of any serious problem but if you use EMC then you need to coordinate with tow different vendors.

I would call EMC. They would of been asked the question about Exchange and SAN disk manay times.

CCR + SCR will be a good solution for high availability. Please review the article Standby Continuous Replication [Planning, Managing, Activating] Notes: As Salman said, CCR nodes if using 2003 then both nodes in main site and SCR in DR site. But now in Windows Server 2008, CCR can cross different sites. It does not require same subnets. You can create CCR by putting one node for each site; then failover will also be a site failover

Hi, Heath, I assume your question has been answered, and I'd like to change the status to "Marked as answer", please feel free to post here if you have any update

First off, thanks for all the feedback. The difficult thing about using SAN vendors as a first line on system architecture and design questions is generally, in my experiences, they lag a bit on product knowledge. Ask about how to do this with Exchange 2003, and EMC has half a dozen docs on how to do it, but finding solutions for new technologies has been a struggle.In a perfect world what I would like to do is use the database portability features of Exchange 2007. Since my SAN replication solution has the LUNs at the DR site, I would like to just mount them on another non-clustered Exchange server. I didn't want have to stand up another CCR cluster. Keeping perspective here, this is a site recovery solution. CCR provides us HA and local host DR at the production data center. I wanted the site recovery scenario to be very simple and straight forward.- Heath