Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Dial tone recovery feature - Part I

Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Dial tone recovery feature - Part I

Proposed Scenario

To cover this tutorial we are going to use a scenario where we have 3 Exchange Server 2007 (2 Mailbox Server and 1 CAS Server) and  we have also some users into the database Mailbox Database that is located on the srv-wk7-mbx01.

The servers that will be used in this article can be seen on Exchange Management Console, as shown in the Figure 04.

Figure 04 visualizing the three servers within Organization.

In this article we are going to simulate a hardware failure on srv-wk7-mbx01 and there is no fast way to recover this server, and also the time to restore this server will be longer than our users are expecting. In this case we can use a disaster recovery operation using a temporary database, also known Dial Tone database. This process basically consist in create an empty database in any available mailbox server, and set up the users to connect in a clean database to receive and send new messages, and in this mean time we can restore the original database into the original server, and finally merge the information of the current database with the original database to provide a consolidate mailbox for the users with all the new messages and the content before the server failure.

Note: If you have a robust backup solution such as DPM v2 (Data Protection Manager) you will be able to recover all sensitive information easily without use a dial tone restore scenario.

Then, based in the proposal scenario we will cover in this article series these following steps:

1.       Hardware failure on srv-wk7-mbx01

2.       Create a new Storage Group and Database on srv-wk7-mbx02 server

3.       Move user configuration from srv-wk7-mbx01 to srv-wk7-mbx02

4.       All users will be connecting in the dial tone database

5.       Inform the users that you have gotten a problem and the messages will be recovered as soon as possible (we can publish this in your intranet web site, send a message for all users or instruct your help desk users to assist the users)

6.       Restore the server srv-wk7-mbx01 in a new hardware

7.       Start a server recover procedure

8.       Restore a database of the old database

9.       Mount the old database

10.   Dismount and copy the current database (dial tone database) from srv-wk7-mbx02 to srv-wk7-mbx01

11.   Use Recovery Storage Group to merge information

12.   Move the users configuration from srv-wk7-mbx02 to original srv-wk7-mbx01

In our current scenario we have four mailboxes on the affected server; as we can see in the Figure 05. Those listed users are located on the srv-wk7-mbx01 in the Mailbox Database.

Figure 05: Visualizing the users that are hosted on Mailbox Database

We can also run the cmdlet get-mailbox | get-MailboxStatistics  to validate the number of items of each mailbox, as shown in Figure 06.

Figure 06: Getting information about mailboxes that will be affected by the mailbox server failure

My user (Anderson.Patricio) had sent 10 messages for two users (Lidiana.Zamprogna and Rodrigo.Rodrigues) to show de dial tone disaster recovery process in action, let’s check out the messages on the Inbox folder of one of these users before the server failure, as shown in figure 07.

Verifying the current scenario

Figure 07: User Lidiana.Zamprogna with 10 messages on her Inbox folder

Doing an online backup of the database

Unfortunately we cannot imagine when a failure will occur but in our article we are going to do a full database backup a few minutes before the crash. We will use the ntbackup tool to do an online backup, as shown in figure 08. Click on Start Backup and in the new window click on Start Backup again.

Figure 08: Starting a full database backup using NTBackup

Right, now we have a backup of  the Mailbox Database and we can move on for the next stage.

The problem…

At this point we have gone over our scenario and we saw that we have an online backup of the database, and the users have already received content into their Inbox folders. Now, we can simulate the mailbox server failure of the srv-wk7-mbx01. The users running OWA will experience the message pop up shown in the Figure 09.

Figure 09: Outlook Web Access error when the users get a failure on the Mailbox Server 01 (srv-wk7-mbx01)

Outlook 2003/2007 clients will get error messages related to the connectivity to the mailbox server, if we run the Connection Status feature (hold on Ctrl and right-click on Outlook icon located on the systray bar) we will see that the connectivity with the mailbox server is broken, as shown in figure 10.

Figure 10: Visualizing the connectivity errors on the Outlook 2007 client with the Mailbox Server

Conclusion

In this first article we have covered the scenario where we will use the dial tone database, backup of the current database and the problem after the mailbox server 01 failure. Next article we will be visualizing how to move the affected users to a new mailbox server while we will start the rebuilding process of the failed server

Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Dial tone recovery feature - Part I