Messaging Gateway

Our corporate headquarters is moving.  Our data center is going to be down for 2 days during the move.   We have a co-located datacenter.  I was considering cloning my virtual Brightmail Gateways (version 8.0.3); bringing them up in the co-location facility; and making the necessary IP address changes on the controllers & scanners to get them to function over there.

This would allow me to collect e-mail that is being sent to us and when the corporate datacenter is back up, I could route the e-mail from the Brightmail Gateways to the corporate mail server.

Is there any problem with cloning these servers?

After cloning, is there a command I can run from the console that will allow me to configure the networking (IP, Gateway, etc...)?

I realize there are issues with the logs and quarantine -- but I am not terribly concerned about that.  I am  just looking for a fairly painless way to capture the e-mail sent to us so our clients don't get re-send warnings or rejection notices.

Thanks for your help.

I have not tried the cloning that gateways in VM so I am not sure how is it going to behave, but I would like to point out that if you are going to take a database backup on one Control Center and restore it onto another with a different IP/hostname, you may have some issues as it is currently not supported:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-gate.nsf/docid/2009073012565654

Regards,

Adnan

Cloning SBG is a real pain.  Strongly consider building new in the new location.

You could try  Clear OSCONFIG from the admin login, but you'll need to have a serial port connection during the intial reconfiguration.

Consider a short contract with a cloud-based service (Messagelabs is Symatec's vendor)

Thanks.

Do you have any experience with VMware?

Build a temp infrastructure in the new location - depending on your workload you might want to dedicate hardware for the scanner and CC roles. Configure only the policies that are local domain or spam related.
Have your DNS provider change the TTL on your MX records to a low value to allow rapid propagation of any changes - say 1 hour. Do this 2x earlier than the current TTL to allow the TTL to propogate.

Just before you shut down in old location, set the new scanners to Accept/Hold and add them to your MX & SPF records. 

Before shutting down the old boxes,
 - generate any report you might need later - include PDF and CVS and mail them to your self.
-  export any config data you can - Reputation config can be exported all at once (you don't need to do each section).
- screen shots of policy
- act on any quarantines,  incident items.

Move to the new site.

You can try Clear OSconfig, but I'm betting that you'll need to rebuild the moved boxes.

Build/Validate configuration, policies,  changes to per scanner settings: DNS/NTP/next hop/IPs allowed to connect, etc.

Once you get the hardware moved/configred, drop the held mail from the VMs onto your moved SBG boxes.


BTW:  I've been able to get SBG running within the free VMware Player (32 bit RedHat Enterprise), build from ISO, but I'd not recommend this for any significant load.