exchange 2008 e-mail

[naster]

I would like to ask some help here, is anybody tried to image or ghost the email exchange server, 2003 or 2008 and that image is in the CD or DVD and I would like that image in the cd/dvdbecome my bootable system incase of disaster of my server..that image will stand as the Operating system of my server,,, in the same machine,,, is this posible and how to set-up this???

[YeOldeStonecat]

While you could technically create a "Live CD"....you would only be allowed to test drive a few functions. But nothing could actually change...because that requires writing data. Say you were running a live CD of Exchange Server..as soon as 1 e-mail arrived....the infostore database would require being written to. So you might say "make it DVD-RW"....but that's too slow..way too slow.

Also, booting an OS from a CD...the performance is absolutely horrible....too slow.

You sound like you're wanting disaster recovery, where you can take your backup image and quickly restore it to similar or different hardware. Plenty of products are out there which allow you to do this, Paragon Software, Acronis, Symantec, Zenith Info, etc. I have Paragons products at my biggest client, 6x servers..each night I do a full backup of the servers drives....just like "cloning partitions". If a server goes belly up, I can restore that full image to another server, and be up and running again in relatively short time.

Another approach to this is VMWare..those virtual servers are just big files that you can move from VMWare server to VMWare server. Many places do this, when they need high availability...run a couple of physical servers...with each of them running several virtual servers with room to spare. If one server starts to have problems, you simply flip its virtual servers to the other one for the time being.