Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory Blog
It's almost like Christmas: 2 new HP servers and 2 Kemp load balancers arrived today. The systems are actually intended for an Exchange 2010 cluster, but since there is still a little time left, it makes sense to test Exchange 2013 high availability with the systems. The following hardware is available for the test ... Read more
On Steve Goodman's website there is a VM available for free download that contains an almost fully configured layer-4 load balancer based on Ubuntu and HAProxy. It is very easy to set up and is ideal for test environments. Unfortunately, load balancing only works for the ClientAccess role and not for the Hub Transport role. Maybe ... Read more
Microsoft has published a great tool that belongs in every emergency kit when a DAG is in operation across 2 data centers. The PowerPoint presentation uses simple questions and instructions to query the status of the data centers and issues the appropriate commands to perform a data center switch-over. Especially in the event of a complete data center failure, you are "easily" ... Read more
If it happens that a database copy in a DAG is faulty, it usually helps to copy the database again (reseed). To initiate the process, the replication of the database to the faulty copy must first be stopped: Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy -Identity "MailboxDatabase\Servername" the parameter "-Identity" is composed of the database name and the server name that has the defective copy. ... Read more
DAG is also included in the Exchange Server 2013 preview. I have tested the setup of the DAG, it is just as easy as with Exchange 2010. I have installed a second Exchange Server for the DAG test (described here). My test environment now looks like this: I configured the second network card as follows: ... Read more
To coincide with the first birthday of Exchange Server 2010, Scott Schnoll from the Exchange Server Team Blog has put videos on high availability online. The video consists of 4 parts and is available here. Anyone planning or using a highly available Exchange environment would be well advised to watch the video. If you are interested, here is the ... Read more
Shadow Redundancy is another way of ensuring high availability for the Exchange 2010 Hub Transport Server. The way it works is quite simple. If a user wants to send a mail, the mail lands in a queue on a Hub Transport Server. The Hub Transport Server then establishes an SMTP connection with an Edge Transport and sends the ... Read more
The DAG (Database Availability Group) is a new feature in Exchange 2010. In Exchange 2007 it was still difficult to ensure high availability for the mailbox role. However, the concept has been thoroughly revised with Exchange 2010 and now makes it easy for the administrator to ensure high availability for the mailbox servers. This article deals with the configuration of a ... Read more
In previous articles I have dealt with the high availability of the mailbox and CAS roles. This article will now focus on the Exchange 2010 Hub Transport role. However, the Hub Transport role is somewhat different to the CAS or mailbox role in terms of high availability. The Hub Transport role is actually already highly available, ... Read more
Introduction The DAG (Database Availability Group) makes it easy for administrators to ensure high availability for the mailbox servers. Spanning a DAG with several databases across several servers is quite simple. But what about the other Exchange Server roles? If there are highly available mailbox servers, but due to a defect the only CAS server in the ... Read more
