Unity and Active Directory - Voicemail only designs

[Tommer Catlin]

I'm looking at deploying a new IPT platform with CCM and Unity with failover. We are going to create a subdomain called IPT.company.com. This domain will be completely seperate from the production domain and will not use anything from it. With that being said, Unity of course needs to have AD to run. So we will create our new domain with Unity being DC's. The CallManagers are in workgroups, so need to worry about those servers.

But then I started thinking about Active Directory and the load for authentication, plus Exchange, and SQL on the same box. I would rather have Unity just be a member server to the domain and install (2) other servers just for authentication. These servers would be used as FSMO roles for this small domain for IPT. They would Global Catalog servers.

My subscriber base is going to be around 800 to start, expanding to 3000 in 2 years. Is this model a good idea? Offloading the AD domain controller roles off Unity and onto another server? Or can Unity handle the requests for AD to run on these boxes?

Thanks much!

Tommer

[Hin Lee]

If you plan on having 3000 subscribers, I would advise having the domain controllers, and exchange servers off-box from Unity. Please see

Cisco Unity Supported Platforms List

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_data_sheet0900aecd802132ef.html

[Tommer Catlin]

What if the Unity servers were clustered? Does this change the config?

[Hin Lee]

>>What if the Unity servers were clustered?

OH YES! In a clustered (we call it failover configuration) config, the Exchange and DC have to be offbox.

[Tommer Catlin]

From what I can see, I can have 2000 Unity Voicemail only users on one box with exchange. But I should have another DCGC to take the load off it for Active Directory.

We will eventually migrate over to UM when our hosted Exchange solution is ready to switch. So to plan for the migration during this installation (crazy talk I know) we will:

- Create a new seperate tree from the parent domain

- install DCGC first

- Install Unity server as a member server

- install unity/exchange unity/sql

- export user list from Exchange/AD from parent domain. Import to IPT domain.

By creating all the accounts exactly the same... (receipent policy, AD logon, etc) we will be able use a third party such as Quest Migration to migrate the messages from one exchange server to the Parent domain exchange cluster.

any other tips?