Clustered Exchange setup tidbit

  • Article

This question came up yesterday on a list I read, so I figured it might be of interest out here.

Do you remember the “Setup Shall Install the Clustered Version of Exchange” pop-up in Exchange 2000? This was the pop-up you’d get when installing the binaries for Exchange 2000 onto a server that was joined to an MSCS cluster, and if you ever saw it, this wording probably stuck with you because it sounded a little strange.

Well, have you seen this pop-up in Exchange 2003? Nope. You haven’t. Although, you might still have seen a pop-up. Or you might not have!

In Exchange 2000, you ALWAYS saw this pop-up when you were doing the install into a cluster.

In Exchange 2003, this is changed. Now there are three possibilities:

  1. Not running on cluster – logs “This is not a clustered machine” to the Exchange Server Setup Progress.Log file. No pop-up.
  2. Running on 1 or 2 node cluster – logs “Microsoft Exchange Setup has detected that you are running in a cluster environment. See https://www.microsoft.com/exchange for updated information on cluster configuration recommendations. ” into the Exchange Server Setup Progress.Log file. No pop-up.
  3. Running on >2 node cluster (ie, such as when adding a 3rd Exchange node) – logs to file just like #2 above, but also pops up the message with an OK button for acknowledgement.