Can Ironport support 2 different servers within 1 domain?

[kravwong1]

Hi All,

The situation is:

Our company's Ironport is using firmware AsyncOS 7.6 and currently is connected to Lotus Notes Server.

However, we are now planning to add 1 more mail server - MS Exchange.

The questions are:

1. Is it possible to connect both Notes and Exchange with 1 domain only?

2. If yes, can we set some filtering to seperate then the incoming email can fall into the designated server?

3. How can we achieve connecting 2 different servers under 1 domain?

Please give any other comments if you have. Thanks!!

Thanks and Regards

Krav

[roger.white]

Krav,

You should be able to do this. However, a curious question, are you planning to migrate off of Lotus notes or is this going to be a permanent solution? Are the mailboxes for both mail servers going to be the same (maybe clustered).

1. Yes, you can have multiple servers assigned to a domain, by specifying the ip address as an additional entry in SMTP routes.

2. This may prove to be the big issue. There is no filtering mechanism that can distinguish lotus notes bound mail from exchange bound mail. For example; if you set both the servers with the same priority in SMTP routes they will round robin, meaning some mail will goto Lotus notes and other mail will goto Exchange. So if this is just to test, you can possibly use the priority option in the SMTP routes. However, this may also be more of a question as to whether you could cluster an Exchange and lotus notes server, which is beyond my understanding.

3.In the SMTP Routes section click on the domain and add in the ip address of the other server. Be mindful that if you keep the priority the same, mail will round robin between the devices. However if you set the first device to 0 and the second device to 10, mail will primarily goto the device with the 0 priority. You will also need to specify the ip address of the second server in your HAT table, if you are using the Relaylist.

[kravwong1]

Thanks for the reply

But I would like to ask some more.

It is possible to migrate to MS Exchange but not yet confirm. The first purpose is to convenience some users who have MS Outlook. Therefore, they should remain their own email address. However, we think it can be a permanent solution for the MS Exchange and Lotus Notes Domino with using same domain, but there is no cluster between 2 server.

For example:

user1@abc.com and user2@abc.com are using MS Exchange,

user3@abc.com and user4@abc.com are using Lotus Notes Domino.

Please leave any comments for our project. Thanks a lot.

[roger.white]

Krav,

Administratively speaking, I would not want to support 2 different mail solutions in any enterprise environment.

Besides, mail is sent to the domain, adc.com, so regardless of what user is on which server, Ironport is only going to filter on the domain and pass the information to the next availble server. Ironport doesnt track the location of a user on a mail server as it is just a proxy. If the servers are not going to be in a cluster, you may not be able to support this solution.

I would consider doing the following: Either migrate all users to Exchange, build a secondary Exchange server, create a cluster, follow the instructions from above to add the secondary Exchange server to Ironport. The result will be a small outage window and you dont have to support a heterogenous mail environment. However, It would probably be best served to post this question on a Lotus Notes or Exchange forum.