Azure Hybrid & Cloud Migration Blog

In this blog post I would discuss one of my blog reader’s questions, which I I came across lately. It was about: “Does Exchange DAG cross-site remote Mailbox Server LUNs be filled with initially data copied and then DAG native replication can start with delta-changes?”

Interestingly when I brainstormed the same question with one of Microsoft Exchange Primer Filed Engineer, I got negative repose as he mentioned that Exchange DAG behavior would be to go for seeding process, which will remove everything from the LUN and will do the fresh copy.

Here is the problem because for these such remote cross-site Exchange DAG Mailbox Servers seeding (copying) a large GBs of mailbox database data over a WAN link which is partitioned for multiple use and application data is quite difficult.

Good News!

Recently in past I managed to implement one of my customer’s Exchange cross-site Exchange DAG with remote mailbox servers. Prior to implementing Exchange Server, the customer had EMC RecoverPoint replicating Exchange primary LUNs to the remote DR EMC VNX SAN storage. In this implementation we found that Exchange remote DAG mailbox servers can be filled with per-data population of Exchange Mailbox Database, and when Exchange Mailbox Database copy starts replicating the Exchange Mailbox logs shipping it only starts replicating the delta-changes. :)

Steps would be to stop appliance or any third-party data replication right before you plan to add the mailbox database copies on your remote Exchange DAG mailbox servers, and then try to get the Exchange native DAG mailbox replication to start copying the databases as soon as possible. So in this way you will try to use your WAN link with less data traffic load.

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