# 2xSBS 2003 on same domain?



## ImagingGuy2015 (Feb 14, 2008)

Hello,

I have a Dell sc440 running as a DC, DNS, DHCP,WINS, AD and Exchange using SBS 2003 OS for a very small business/non profit operation.

We recently had the server motherboad die. Not being able to find a proper dell replacement locally, I over-nighted a used board I found on ebay, replaced the dead one and had the machine back up and running in a few days.

During this downtime, none of the domain users could connect to machines with domain credentials or receive mail as the machine was down.

Since then I have acquired a second, almost identical Dell SC440 also with SBS 2003 installed.

What I am wondering is if there is a way to setup this second SBS 03 machine as a secondary domain controller as well as a backup exchange server.

What I am thinking is that if server A dies suddenly, Server B picks up where it left off and users are able to login to network PCs using domain credentials and still receive exchange emails.

I have never setup a domain like this (i am just a small time guy) but I have heard that there would be issues having 2 SBS machines running in the same domain. I am thinking this is a licensing gimmick as a business that would require more than 2 servers is not "small" but really I am just speculating from what I have read/heard from others.

If that is the case, does this mean I would need to reinstall a copy of Server 03 standard (instead of sbs03) and a seperate copy of exchange on the second server to get this to work as I intend or am I OK trying to do a setup like this with 2 x SBS 03 machines?

As you can tell I am not a pro at this stuff so please have some patience with me. I am not all that bright when it comes to server os however I am persistent.

Thanks for any insight you may be able to provide!


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## srhoades (May 15, 2003)

Cannot be done. You can have multiple domain controllers with SBS, as long as the SBS machine has all the FSMO roles, but you cannot run two SBS machines simultaneously. Eventually one (if not both) will start rebooting every hour.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925652


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## ImagingGuy2015 (Feb 14, 2008)

Well thats not great news, but really would it even matter if the second machine reboots every hour? As long as its online if server A fails, I could care less about what it is doing when its not needed as it is not being used for anything else. Maybe power cycling every hour for years on end would mess it up though ? Its only role in life would be to authenticate users and run exchange if server A ever had a hardware failure.

Really all I care about is disaster recovery. I just need to make sure that if server A hardware ever fails like it did last time that I can at least get everything up and running asap.

Another idea that might work I am thinking is if I kept the 2nd machine offline. Then if server A has a hardware failure, I could just unplug one of the drives (2x500GB in raid 1) and then plug it into server B and boot it up. Then at least there would be minimal downtime providing both of the hard disks dont suddenly fail. 

I wonder if the server OS would give me much grief switching between the 2 PCs. I do it all the time with XP machines, but never tried with a server OS. Then only hardware difference is that one is a xeon 1.6 and the other is a pentium D 3.0. Same mobo, RAID controller etc.


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## srhoades (May 15, 2003)

You're better of investing in a decent backup solution. Many backups now can be converted into a VHD to run in a virtual machine. That way you can run the backup in a VM until you can get the original server repaired or replaced.


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## ImagingGuy2015 (Feb 14, 2008)

interesting that you mentioned the vhd hard drive images.

I had previously used clonezilla to implement backups images of their xp desktops, but never thought about trying to use something like clonezilla on a server OS with hardware raid, but since the setups are practically identical I figured it was worth trying.

Today I tried it out and was able to make an image of serverA running SBS 03 with multiple partitions running in raid 1 with hardware raid. I was then able to restore the image on serverB without issue.

Now that I have the image, I believe all I need to do is make a nightly backup of active directory and exchange.

Then if server A ever dies suddenly, I just turn on server B, restore a recent backup of active directory and the exchange database and I think I will be good to go as there are never any configuration changes made to the server other than windows and AV updates.

and since both servers have a legit license of sbs 03 with the same number of legit CALs, I believe I am perfectly legal with this as well as far as licensing goes.

Time to do some testing I guess.


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