In both Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013, customers can deploy one or more replication networks in a database availability group (DAG).  There can be many reasons for using a replication network, but in most cases they are used to provide a dedicated log shipping channel between members of the same DAG.   As documented on…

When Exchange 2007 is installed on a cluster there are several Exchange 2007 specific resources that are created.  These include: A system attendant resource. An information store resource. A database instance resource coordinating to each database created on the CMS. Sometimes these clustered resources are accidentally deleted using cluster administrator or failover cluster manager.  This…

In Exchange 2010 the add-mailboxdatabasecopy command is utilized to add mailbox database copies to database availability group members.  When a copy is first added to a member the database is automatically seeded along with the content index.  In some instances administrators desire to add a copy but not immediately invoke database seeding.  In order to…

In recent weeks I’ve had several peers and customers present with concerns that when using Local Continuous Replication (LCR), Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), Standby Continuous Replication (SCR), of the Database Availability Group (DAG)  passive database copies appear in a dirty shutdown state.   In general a database has two states – Clean Shutdown and Dirty…

When using continuous replication in Exchange 2007, an operation that sometimes needs to be performed is a database seed.  This operation is first performed as part of enabling replication, and thereafter it is performed infrequently as part of the process for recovering from divergence. There are a few ways to perform a database seed, but…

When administrators run Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup they notice that certain fields within the output are not populated.  In some scenarios this leads administrators to attempt to change settings of the DAG or believe that there is an operational issues with the DAG.    [PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup DAG | fl RunspaceId                             : 37b4f2b4-06b8-4e87-9252-968452ab3a28 Name                                   : DAG Servers                                : {DAG-4,…

As a part of a datacenter switchover process, administrators run Stop-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup to stop DAG members in the failed datacenter.  This cmdlet is responsible for updating the stoppedMailboxServers attribute of the DAG object within Active Directory.   When this command is run and multiple AD sites are involved, the command attempts to force AD replication between…

This question has seem to come up a lot lately, and since I have an opinion on it I figured it’s time to blog it. When you run Exchange setup for the first time we will always create a default storage group and default mailbox database (also depending on installation order you may get a…

In Windows 2003 when cluster would attempt to create or modify Kerberos enabled machine accounts it would do so by leveraging the rights assigned to the cluster service account.  The Windows 2003 cluster service would use this domain account for the logon right at service startup. In Windows 2008 when the cluster attempts to create…

A question that I see a lot of, and causes come confusion out there, is why does get-storagegroupcopystatus report a status of initializing for replicated storage groups.  This status occurs when using any form of replication (LCR = local continuous replication / CCR = cluster continuous replication / SCR = standby continuous replication).   Some…