Blogging has been light...

cuz work has been heavy.

I've been installing Exchange 2007 mail roles on 64bit VMWare Virtual Machines. Layers upon layers of aggravation.

First I had to build 3 64 bit servers.
Then I had to install the Unix based VMWare ESX on each
Then each machine got two Windows Enterprise 2003 server VMs for a total of 6 VMs that all needed hotfixes and upgrades to handle MX2007.
Then I created a clustered mailbox server on two of the VMs.
I then created two hub transports required for mail routing.
The last two VMs got edge transport (internet SMTP) and OWA (webmail) on the DMZ.
All of the above required tweaking Active Directory in the Domain as well as our internal and external DNS servers, not to mention the firewall.

Each installation requires it's own brand of suck...most of which involve command line manipulation of shit no human should be required to touch.

So I get it all working yesterday and move a couple of mailboxes to the new 2007 from the old 2003 Exchange server. My mailbox being one of them.

Today I'm testing communication, and everything works fine...email moving smoothly thru the enterprise and the interweb.

Then I test the cluster by forcing a failover. What should happen is that the passive node of the cluster should take over the mailbox role when the active cluster goes down.

Gak.

The failover fails miserably, violently removing the cluster and the two mailbox installations from this earth...along with the mailboxes I moved to the new server.

So tomorrow I have to restore the mailboxes to the old server from backup.

Then I can start rebuilding.