Unity Digital Networking - Design question

[joel]

Business requirement:

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Users have to be able to transfer voicemails between the Unity servers.

Current Unity Setup:

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Voicemail only (Exchange on Unity server) - No Unified Messaging - No Domino.

1 (One) Unity Offbox message store with Failover (Main site)

4 (Four) remote sites with Unity voicemail only servers

Unity servers at each site are on separte domains as Domain controllers

Unity servers are on 4.0.5 and will be upgraded to 5.x when the new domain structure is created.

Solution:

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Digitial networking the Unity servers by bringing all the Unity servers into 1 (one) single domain

(Are there other options? VPIM seems to be a point to point solution)

Questions:

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ADS structure:

Can the Main site Unity Offbox message store server be the ADS Global catalog server and every other Unity server be Domain controllers in the same domain?

Or should there be only 1 domain controller and all the other Unity servers at the remote sites have to be just member servers on the domain? If so, what would happen when the Domain controller is down?

Exchange:

Can the Offbox message store server be the exchange mailstore for the main site and all the remote site Unity servers at each site be the Exchange mailstore for their respective sites?

References:

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CM 6.x SRND - Unity chapter

Unity 5 Design guide

Unity 5 Networking guide

Are there other resources?

Greatly appreciate any input!

Joel

[Tommer Catlin]

The correct way to do this would be to create (1) signal domain. Exchange at each location. Then setup AD sites and services accordingly. This will maximize the site links/speed and mail (voicemail) transportation between Exchange servers.

You will basically have a single directory also for your company (or you can customize the searches by site, etc)

You should have a GC and a FSMO server at the main location

DC's at each site

Exchange at site with the local Unity server.

I setup a 30 site/30 Unity server digital networking, etc. Worked great. Building out the AD infrastructure is key though when any WAN involvement

hope this helps

[joel]

I created a test bed with 2 Unity servers.

Site 1 Unity server with GC/DC, Exchange and Unity and a Site 2 Unity server with DC, Exchange and Unity.

when The GC is down I lose the local message store on the Site2 server.

TAC says I need to make my site2 Unity server a GC as well.

This is what some of the documenation points to as well.

Has someone does it this way.

Joel

[Ginger Dillon]

Hi Joel -

It is pretty much standard to make domain controllers also global catalog servers. That is what we had to do, otherwise Unity had some problems with subscriber import - we'd do the import and then the subscriber would disappear from the Unity SA. Once we made all our DCs GCs as well, this problem went away. Note: We have multiple Unity servers installed in multiple domains, different Exchange admin groups and having the DCs be GCs also assists with timely replication as the Unity servers are part of the same dialing domain.

Ginger

[Tommer Catlin]

The problem is the FSMO roles in AD. You will need to have the roles split up or have another server that just does FSMO roles AD.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324801