Exchange 2016 IP-less DAG on Primary site

Question

In primary site Exchange 2016 has configured with IP-less DAG and now migrating to Exchange 2019 on secondary site, Can we create normal DAG of Exchange 2019 with IP and computer object in AD, or still become part of this IP-less of our new Exchange 2019 and how file share witness will be configured.

Please assist

Answer 1

Hi @Innocent Heartvoice ,

We could know that, all servers within a DAG must be running the same version of Exchange. For example, you can't mix Exchange 2013 servers and Exchange 2016 servers in the same DAG. So here you couldn't add the newly installed Exchange 2019 to your existing 2016 DAG.

Do you still want to keep the Exchange 2016 server after you successfully migrated all you users and data to Exchange 2019?

It is allowed to have multiple dags when you have the active users on both the primary site as well on the secondary site. However it is easier to manage a single DAG, you can have a single DAG with multiple servers spread around multiple datacenters.

And the official document introduces the Witness server placement considerations, applied to Exchange 2016/2019 as well.
When a DAG has been deployed across two datacenters, a new configuration option in Exchange 2013 is to use a third location for hosting the witness server. If your organization has a third location with a network infrastructure that is isolated from network failures that affect the two datacenters in which your DAG is deployed, then you can deploy the DAG's witness server in that third location, thereby configuring your DAG with the ability automatically failover databases to the other datacenter in response to a datacenter-level failure event. If your organization only has two physical locations, you can use a Microsoft Azure virtual network as a third location to place your witness server.

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