Azure Hybrid & Cloud Migration Blog

Real Life Exchange 2010 Disaster Recovery

Friends,

Today while I was searching on Internet, for reading more to design Exchange 2010 Disaster Recovery Methodologies, this is what I got, and I found it will be quire helpful for everyone, because this got tested and carried out for one Real World Exchange 2010 Disaster Recovery Scenario:

Method goes as follows:

1 | Find some live mailbox servers that had the spare capacity to mount 22 databases. Split the list of databases to be mounted among them.

2 | For each mailbox server, copy over the database and log directories so we had the data to use.

3 | Perform a soft recovery with eseutil /r on each database/log set to commit any uncommitted log files and ensure we could actually mount the data later in the process.

4 | Create the new mailbox databases: new-mailboxdatabase -name <name> -server <server> -EdbFilePath <path to recovery folder, e.g. c:\RecoverDBs\RecoverDB1\<name of original edb>.edb> -LogFilePath <path to logs, e.g. c:\RecoverDBs\RecoverLogs1>

Pro Tip: Use a new name for the database. If the old database was named DAG1-DB001, you might use DAG1-RecoveryDB001.

5 | Set the newly created databases to allow file restore: set-mailboxdatabase <db name> -AllowFileRestore:$true

6 | Copy in the database, logs and catalog data to the correct folders (those specified in step 4)

7 | Mount the databases one at a time: mount-database <DatabaseName>

8 | Once the database is mounted we can now re-home all the users with mail data there: get-mailbox -database <OriginalDatabaseName> | ?{$_.ObjectClass -NotMatch ‘(SystemAttendantMailbox|ExOldDbSystemMailbox)’} | set-mailbox -database <RecoveryDatabaseName>

9 | If you’re running with multiple copies then keep in mind that you’ve only got one live copy of the new database. You can either add a copy of the new database or do what we did and move them to databases on your new DAG that (hopefully) has multiple copies already. If you choose to go the route of moving them to existing healthy databases the command is: get-mailbox -database <RecoveryDatabaseName> | new-moverequest -TargetDatabase <HealthyDatabaseName>

Comments and/or questions are welcome in the comments. I just wrote this from memory so if I missed anything along the way please let me know.

Source:
http://jeremyphillips.org/2010/01/real-life-exchange-2010-disaster-recovery/

Zahir Hussain Shah