New exchange installation - need suggestions

Hi everyone

We are using an old email system and we are planning to implement MS Exchange for the first time. We have TWO Domain Controllers and some of our users login on a DC and the other users on the other DC - this was done for security purposes ie: both DCs are independent from each other.

If we are to implement MS Exchange where should we install the server? can it be a new domain or we have to integrate it to an existing DC?

Thanks!

Can you give some more information related to:
- How do you expect the users to login to the mail system?
- Sounds like you have two domains one for each DC? correct?
-- if correct, will all users have same mail format (@something.com) or is it related to the DC they login with?

If you have the exchange server in its own domain, you probably have to create the users again in that domain (not sure how replication will/can work with this).

This is my existing setup: TOPOLOGY

As you can see I have:

TWO Domain Controllers, running independently from eachother - one running Windows 2000 and a legacy mail server system and the other running Windows 2008. Both have an AD schema.

An SMTP server running Windows 2003 and also an antispam filter

I would imagine you would have to setup a trust between the two domains since Exchange ties in very closely with Active Directory. This would allow you to setup a new mailbox database for the users on the different domain, and from there you can add user mailboxes for each user in the different domain (in this case testdomain2k.com).

You would also need to make sure that if the domains are on different ip network schemes, that each network can talk to eachother. For instance, if one network is on a 192.168.1.0/24 and the other is on a 10.1.1.0/24, you'd have to setup routing between the two. However, if all of them are on the same network, then this shouldn't be an issue.

Lastly, you might want to add a secondary DNS zone on each of the servers pointing to the opposite domain. For instance, on testdomain28k.com, you would add a secondary dns zone, and point the Master Server to the testdomain2k.com DNS server.