We have a production Unity 4.0.4 box in the office and a cold standby Unity 4.0.4 server located in a DR site several hundred miles away. The box in the DR site is off line, and addressed with the same address as the production box.

We would like to be able to back up the production Unity box about once a week or so, and do a restore onto the cold standby to keep it loosely up to date. The first time we we ran DIRT, this worked fine. The second time DIRT refused to restore claiming the box wasn't clean.

We aren't using a primary and failover because this is a VM situation and the user mailboxes would be lost. We need to be able to bring up the DR system with the user mailboxes on board.

There is no way we can wipe this box and reload it once a week. The machines are not identical hardware and are too far apart for swapping drives to be an option.

What's the best way to handle this issue? How does one keep a cold standby up to date since DIRT won't allow you to install on what it calls an unclean box? Jeff, I get why DIRT does this, but is there some sort of reset switch we could throw to wipe it back to a clean state without having to wipe and reload the entire box? It is my understanding Cisco supports a cold standby server (and this one is fully licensed as a regular server), so I'm puzzled as to how to bring it up to date.

Appreciation in advance for a workable solution.