MailEnable Enterprise - Clustering on a NAS

[playadelrey]

I'm trying to configure ME Enterprise on two servers that will use Microsoft Network Load Balancing to provide a two-server cluster. The purpose is to provide clustering support for scalability and for redundancy in case of a server failure. We host approximately 200 domains and 1,500 mailboxes.

I've upgraded our original ME Professional server to ME Enterprise (for reference, called Server A). I then moved all of the MailEnable data and config folders to a NAS (for reference, called Server C) and pointed all of Server A's folders to the NAS. I properly set up the user accounts, permissions, etc. and everything is working very well. No problems at all.

I then shut down Server A temporarily and installed ME Enterprise on Server B. I pointed the installation of ME on Server B to the share on the NAS. All accounts were set up properly and ME Enterprise installed correctly and everything worked very well. No problems. Even the Web Mail is working.

I'm now preparing to turn Server A back on. Remember that it's already pointing to the NAS. I do not want to install ME on Server C, only Server A and Server B. I noticed however that on both Server A and on Server B under the Cluster tab in the MMC that they are both already set to "Member Server" and are pointing to the NAS server as the "Server Name".

This seems then that if I turn Server A back on, it will be in a cluster with Server B. My question is what purpose exactly does the "Cluster Controller" serve? If Server A and Server B already think they are in a cluster, will there be problems with having them both turned on without a Cluster Controller?

Once I can verify this, I will be enabling NLB on Server A and Server B to share a single IP address and provide the fault tolerance we're looking for. We already have the VLAN set up on our switch so this single question is the last step in the project.

Any help is appreciated. I'll post any findings I have later on here regardless.

[reino]

We have excactly the same question, mailenable, any solution for this ?

[grnst]

same question here

[MailEnable]

My question is what purpose exactly does the "Cluster Controller" serve?

MailEnable determines whether a machine is a cluster controller by checking if it provides a mailenable$ share. There is no significant difference between the role played by the controller and the members, with the following exception.

When servers negotiate roles (eg: who is going to route a message or check it for viruses, etc), priority is given to the controller - but only if it "aslks" to be involved in the cluster (which it will not do in the scenario you mentioned). ie: there should be no problems.

[demand-soft]

I have a similar setup as playadelrey except we do not have a VLAN because we are using an unmanaged switch. I have tested both our servers A and B individually and all is working properly. Yet when I enable the NLB cluster and have them share the one virtual IP address all traffic stops flowing. Even pinging doesn’t go through.

We have NLB running for other website applications and they respond how they should. When we add the new virtual IP to the cluster (that is tied to MailEnable) and all servers converge properly… all connections to the virtual IP that was just added go dead.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[dslchiphead]

My question is what purpose exactly does the "Cluster Controller" serve?

MailEnable determines whether a machine is a cluster controller by checking if it provides a mailenable$ share. There is no significant difference between the role played by the controller and the members, with the following exception.

When servers negotiate roles (eg: who is going to route a message or check it for viruses, etc), priority is given to the controller - but only if it "aslks" to be involved in the cluster (which it will not do in the scenario you mentioned). ie: there should be no problems.

How does this work if the share resides on a NAS disk and the use of that particular share name mailenable$ can not be used?

Both nodes, in my case, point to the same NAS share and all the MailEnable services run under same domain userID and the share provides access to that userID. Both of the nodes Messaging Manager show that they are just Member of the cluster.