I’ve read in documentation that if you have 2 servers in cluster, and one of them go down, mail routing will fail over and people that normally get their mail delivered on “Server A”, will get their mail delivered to “Server B” while “Server A” is down. Is this how it works?
Also, is it possible in any way to set up mail failover without clustering the servers? Our servers are on several continents and WAN speed might not allow us to setup a cluster, therefore wondering if it will be possible to have mail failover without one. I know I could change mail server in all person documents in the address book as long as all mail files are replicated but that sounds like alot of work…
Simply having two replicating servers holding all mail files will provide a certain level of failover protection.
But, replicas are likely to be somewhat out of sync and if your lines are slow anyway, replicating each mail box everywhere is probably not a great idea.
It’s highy recommended to have the servers next to each other in the same location for clustering. You are right that you would may see some bandwidth issues doing it over contents. It’s simply by design. If cost of hardware is an issue, you may want to look into using VMWare as a platform to host servers. While running VMWare you can setup another Domino server and share the resources of the hardware. You can run, and well, Domino on a Linux host to lower software licensing even further.