AD sites and Unity

[Chris Deren]

I have a general question on what impact do AD sites have on Unity. I have 3 Unity systems each one with failover and seperate Exchange/GC/DC partner server, they are all in the same AD forrest in seperate sites (different locations). The failover servers are all in the same physical location. Is it best practice to place them in the same site? Also, if sites were not created would it have any adverse affect on Unity performance (AD replications)? If anyone can point me to a good document describing it I would appreciate it.

Chris

[Hin Lee]

In Chapter 2: Network and Infrastructure Considerations of Cisco Unity Design Guide (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_implementation_design_guide_book09186a008022f63b.html) there is information about your setup under paragraph Multi-Site WAN with Distributed Messaging ( http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/products/ps4608/c1612/ccmigration_09186a008022f4aa.pdf )

If you are working with locations physically separated, it's best to implement sites to prevent unnecessary AD/Windows traffic across links. For example, someone located in Seattle authenticating to a server in New York would not be prudent.

[kechambe]

Unity is AD site aware. When AvDSAD and AvDSGlobalCatalog reconnect they will only get only a DC/GC in the same site by default. This is because Unity replication with a DC/GC can be bandwidth intensive and it's sensitive to delay while importing users and so on. We do not support having Unity talk to a DC/GC over a WAN link. All servers must be in the same LAN.

The same rule applies to a failover part. They must be in the same physical location and thus the same AD site. A WAN link between a failover pair is not supported.

Thanks,

Keith

[maratimer_2]

I have a question about this. I have 3 unity 4.05 E2K off-box exchange servers (with failover) in one dialing domain. In the GC/DC tool, all three servers are pointing at 3 different GCs and DCs across the WAN, this is what Unity connected to during configuration. All three servers are located together in one building in NA yet they all configured themselves to get updates from GC/DCs in Europe. I tried to go into the tool and force a reconnect to the local GC and DCs as per the documentation, but it actually forces a reconnect to the servers across the WAN - is this a reported or known issue or perhaps I didnt re-configure it properly... Feedback would be appreciated.