Understanding and implementing local mail replicas in Lotus Notes Mail
The flexibility and freedom provided by replication has been an unsurpassed benefit of using IBM Lotus Notes. Many organizations choose to leverage this powerful feature on a full-time basis and have configured their users to work with local replicas of their Notes databases, including mail databases.
In addition to the points discussed in this article, Lotus Notes/Domino added features that may make implementing local mail replicas even more enticing. This article discusses these additional enhancements and recommends ways to set up local mail replicas. Prior to explaining the local replica model and the technical details behind establishing the environment within your infrastructure, let’s look at an example of the applicability of the model.
Example for implementing local mail replicas
Every environment has unique requirements, and therefore, it is difficult to outline a set of standards or recommendations that can be applied to all organizations. The following example is intended to assist you in outlining a successful plan for deploying local mail replicas.
XYZ Company over time has deployed Lotus Domino mail servers for each new location because that was the standard configuration architected and because most sites with less than 25 users had low bandwidth available to them. Most of the email communication within the company takes place between locations, and there is minimal requirement to email users located within the same office. Over time the number of Lotus Domino mail servers in the environment grew to 37 outside of the central location serving approximately 1,400 users, while the main office had two clustered Lotus Domino mail servers serving 2,900 users. The Corporate Finance department questioned the number of servers and licenses that were required to run the electronic messaging environment. To reduce the number of servers and licenses required, but to still provide high availability and load balancing, the IT department decided to re-locate a portion of the user population to the central office and to implement local mail replicas.
Local mail database replication explained
Many times, we hear people talk about local mail versus server-based mail. But what does this really mean? Local mail database replication refers to taking a replica of a user’s mail file onto his or her workstation to allow the user to work with his email without connecting to the server. At a periodic interval, the outgoing email is sent, and the mail file is replicated with the server version to exchange any changes between the two databases. A depiction of this environment configuration is represented in figure 1.
Figure 1. Local mail replica environment configuration
Replicate lotus notes mail
To create this type of environment, you need to configure certain settings on a user’s Lotus Notes client.
A replica of the user’s mail database must be created on the user’s workstation. It is highly recommended that a directory catalog be used to let the user look up names when addressing mail messages while working locally. Either you, the administrator, or the user can create local replicas manually from the user’s workstation or by use of Lotus Notes/Domino policies. After a local replica and directory catalog are created, they must be set to replicate with the server replicas of these databases to keep changes synchronized. We recommend that these databases replicate every 30 minutes. By configuring replication to occur every 30 minutes, you ensure that the client will not reduce performance of the server and client by replicating too often.
The Lotus Notes user preferences on the workstation must be set to check for new mail on the server. This preference should be set to check for new mail every five minutes, which allows the user to receive mail on a much shorter interval than the 30-minute replication interval. This ensures that the client maintains an open session with the Domino server and receives notification of new mail on a frequent basis.
The Lotus Notes client on the user’s workstation must also specify the local replica of the user’s mail file as the location to work with email. Additionally, a number of changes must be made to the client configuration to specify the use of a local directory catalog when addressing mail messages. By making these changes, the user can work seamlessly on his local replica and have an experience very close to that of working on the server.
This may seem like a lot of changes for a user or you to make manually from the user’s workstation. While manual configuration is an option, it is also possible for you to create policies in the Lotus Notes/Domino environment that make these changes without having to visit a single workstation. Because policies let you reconfigure a great number of workstations at the same time, great care should be taken to roll out these changes in a granular fashion so as not to flood the network with requests to create replicas of mail files and directory catalogs all at the same time.
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