2.1 Designing Your GroupWise System for Disaster

When you set up your GroupWise system, make sure that you do not set it up in a fragile manner. The most fragile way to set up your GroupWise system is to have the Domain, Post Office, and GWIA all on the same server and have your GroupWise client connecting using an IP address to the GroupWise server.

Setting up your GroupWise system this way means that if your GroupWise server fails, you can switch the GWDR server to Disaster Recovery mode, but you will have to tell each user to change the IP address their GW client uses, and they will only be able to email between users on the system. However, without a GWIA your users will not be able to send or receive mail from the Internet. So this will work if just the MTA or POA goes down and won’t come up for some reason.

We can make this system more robust by making a few changes:

  • Set up an A record in your DNS so that the GroupWise client will connect to the server you specify with a hostname instead of an IP address. This way you only have to change the A record in the DNS when you need to have your users connect to another GroupWise server or the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server.

  • Set up multiple GroupWise servers and split up the agents across those server so if one server goes down, your GroupWise system will still work. This includes setting up the GWIA on a separate server so if the GW server fails, GWDR can use the GWIA for external messages.

Making these changes allows your system to deal with the GroupWise server going down. This is better, but this design will not be able to withstand multiple server failures. For that we need to design for site robustness. Site robustness is having a secondary, off-site, or disaster recovery site that may include the following:

  • A secondary DNS server where you can update the A record that will direct the users to the proper location.

  • A GroupWise WebAccess server so users can access their mail anywhere.

  • A secondary GWIA for GroupWise to fail over to if the primary GWIA fails.