UNITY upgrade to 3.15 and UMR question

[mfrangipane]

I need a reccomendation on an upgrade path and I have a UMR question as well.

I have a standalone Voicemail only UNITY server running Exchange 5.5 and UNITY 3.13 I will be migrating to UNITY 3.15 with Failover. My question is I now have to build a seperate Exchange server to support failover so should I build the seperate Exchange server and join the existing exchange domain and just move the mailboxes to the new server? At that point I would upgrade to UNITY version 3.15 and Exchange will remain on the server. Or, should I back up the existing UNITY with DIRT, build a new UNITY server without installing Exchange on it and then import the users back using DIRT?

Next question- I have 2 UNITY servers (voicemail only) running 3.15 and Failover. I have a seperate server running Exchange 2K as my message store server. The only server that is running AD is the Exchange server. So my question is if the Exchange server fails will the UNITY still be able to authenticate the users in UMR mode. UNity should be able to authenticate users even if the Exchange server is down in SQL correct?

[kechambe]

There are several different ways that you could go about this migration. Here is the course I would take:

-Setup one of your new servers as a separate DC/Exchange server.

-Setup the other new server to be the new primary Unity 3.1(5) server.

-Upgrade the old server from 3.1(3) to 3.1(5).

-Backup with DiRT.

-Restore with DiRT to the new 3.1(5) primary.

-Reinstall the old server and make it the new failover.

User passwords are stored in SQL. When the Exchange server is up and running Unity will check the password the caller inputs against that which is in SQL and logon to the users Exchange mailbox. If the Exchange server is offline and Unity is running in UMR mode, then the Exchange logon is skipped but the password is still checked against SQL.

Hope that helps,

Keith

[mfrangipane]

Keith,

Thank you for replying to my posting. As you have mentioned there are a couple of ways to go about this upgrade. I was going to go about it this way tell me what you think. Backup the 313 UNITY with DIRT. Uninstall UNITY from the old server leaving Exchange 5.5 on it. Upgrade the exchange 5.5 server to exchange 2K. Build one of the new servers with UNITY 3.13 restore the DIRt file then upgrade to UNITY 4.0 (we decide to go to 4.0 instead).

What do you think?