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Creating a Database Availability Group (DAG) in Exchange 2010

Posted by Dominique Hermans on February 1, 2011 Leave a commentView Comments Categories
Microsoft (12)
This article focuses on the installation and configuration of a Database Availability Group (DAG) in Exchange
Server 2010 (SP1). Please note that the Enterprise edition of Windows Server is required for configuring of Exchange (6)
a DAG. The DAG uses components of clustering, which is only available within the Enterprise Edition of Hyper-V (1)
Windows Server. Lync (2)
SQL (1)
The description of a DAG can best be quoted from Technet: W indow s Server (3)
Active Directory (1)
A database availability group (DAG) is a set of up to 16 Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Mailbox servers
that provides automatic, database-level recovery from a database, server, or network failure. DAGs use Tagged
continuous replication and a subset of Windows failover clustering technologies to provide high
availability and site resilience. Mailbox servers in a DAG monitor each other for failures. When a Mailbox 834 Active Directory ad leightweight
server is added to a DAG, it works with the other servers in the DAG to provide automatic, database- directory services autodiscover automation
level recovery from database failures. Bridgeheads Domain Membership Edge edge
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There’s no need to install or configure the cluster services before installing Exchange or configuring the
exchange exchange
DAG. Mailbox servers are allowed to have other roles installed, but the DAG will only provide redundancy for
the mailbox role. Access to client access servers (CAS) can be made highly available by using a load
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At this point I assume you have configured two (or more) Exchange servers, each holding the Mailbox role. Bridgeheads Replication roles Server 2008 R2
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Also, I recommend having 2 NICs in each server, 1 for the production data, and 1 for replication data. I’d like Windows Server
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to put the replication NIC on a different subnet for isolation of replication data and configure the NIC like the Embedded XPe
picture below, with only IPv4 and the Link Layer Topology Disovery Mapper and Responder. Also click
properties of IPv4 and uncheck “Register in DNS”.
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and usage w ith SQL Server 2008
Liz van Dijk on Large Pages, theory and usage
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Gabes Virtual World » Large Pages,
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Virtual World on Large Pages, theory and
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Return to the network connection control panel, press alt, click advanced > advanced settings and make
sure your data network is listed on top, so it will be accessed by network services first. Disaster Recovery Plan
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Fire up the exchange management console and navigate to Organization Configuration – Mailbox. ARC serve High Availability
arcserve.com /HighAvailability

Give the mailbox databases logical names. I’d like to use the following naming convention: [hostname of
Supermicro 1U Twin™
original mailbox holder]-[mailboxname]. Doing this, it is easy to see whether a mailbox is currently on it’s 2x Intel® Xeon® based Systems in 1U
original host, or whether is has failed over to an alternative server in the DAG. High-efficiency, Double Performance
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The name of the mailbox can be changed by right-clicking it and changing the name in the properties pane.
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When you change the name of the database in the properties pane, it doesn’t actually change the name of
the database itself. You can do this by right clicking the database, and choosing “Move Database Path”. As
can be seen in the screenshot below, you can change the name of the edb here in the “Database paths”.

Do note the following when moving the database, or changing the database file path:

The action fails when the database is being backed up.

During the process, the database will be dismounted and remounted at the new location. During
this time, the database will be unavailable to users.
The action can’t be used on replicated mailbox databases.

Setting up the witness directory

Microsoft recommends to use a hub transport server for the witness directory. Please note that this
configuration doesn’t make much sense when you use the mailbox role and hub transport role on the same
server. If server fails you lose the mailbox copy and also the file witness share, which holds information on
your cluster, so no failover action will take place.

If you use a server other than the hub transport you must add the “Exchange Trusted Subsystem” group to
the local admin group on the other server. Please note that when you are testing this setup in a lab
environment, you can’t use a domain controller to host your file witness directory, since a domain controller
doesn’t have a local administrators group.

On the server you decide to host the witness directory on, you don’t have to manually create a directory
which will hold the information on your cluster setup, this will be done by the Exchange Management
Console later in this post.

Setting up the Database Availability Group

Open the Exchange Management console and navigate to Organization Configuration – Database Availablility
Groups. On the right hand pane, click “New Database Availability group”. In the wizard that’s being shown,
give a name to the DAG, specify the FQDN of your witness server, and insert the directory that has to be
used to store cluster information in. Note that this has to be the local path on the server.

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When the wizard is done configuring your DAG and you did not use a Hub transport server to host your
witness share, you will receive an error stating that the Exchange trusted subsystem is not part of the local
admin group. Since we did configure this, the error can safely be ignored.

Press finish and right click the newly created DAG. Choose “Manage Database Availability Group
Membership”. In the wizard that is being shown, click add to add your mailbox servers that will be used in
the DAG.

Both Nodes in the cluster are now added to the DAG. Next we have to make the DAG usable by adding a
static IP address to the DAG cluster. This is done by navigating to Organization configuration – Mailbox –
Database Availability Group Tab, rightclicking the DAG, choosing properties and navigating to the IP Adresses
tab. Add the IP address that represents the DAG.

Next, the networks that are used for the DAG have to be examined and configured. Since the servers hold
two NICS that both are in a separate subnet, we have to disable the data network from being used as
replication network for the DAG.

This is done by navigating to Organization configuration – Mailbox – Database Availability Group Tab and
selecting the DAG. In the lower section of the screen, we can now see that both networks are used for
replication. Right click the DAGNetwork that represents the Data network, click properties and remove the
tick before “enable replication”.

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This can also be done using the Exchange Management Shell, with the following command:

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupNetwork –Identity “[DAGName]\DagNetwork01” –ReplicationEnabled:$false

–IgnoreNetwork:$True

Adding Mailbox databases to the DAG

Return to the “database management” tab within the Exchange Management Console and right click the
mailbox database that you want to add to the DAG. Choose “Add Mailbox Database Copy”.

In the wizard, click browse and select the mailbox server(s) you want to host a copy of the selected Mailbox
database.

The Activation preference number that can be configured is used to set a preference of activation. The
lower the activation preference number, the earlier in the process the database copy will be made active
when mailbox databases with a lower activation preference number are inaccessible.

You can now see both database copies of the database when you select the database. The database starts
resynchronizing immediately. The time this takes depends on your infrastructure and the size of your
database. When Exchange is done synchronizing, the “copy status” changes to “Healthy”. At this point, the
active server shows the “Mounted” status, and the passive server shows “Healthy”. You can now inspect the
passive servers database files to see that all database files have been synchronized.

The Copy Queue Length is the number of transaction logs that need to be copied to the target server. The
Replay Queue Length is the number of transaction logs that need to be replayed into the database on the
target server.

Database Availability Tasks

Now that the DAG configuration is in place and active, this section shows some tasks that are common for
DAGs.

Suspending / resuming database copies

Suspending and resuming the database can be used if you want to stop a database copy from synchronizing

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to do maintenance. From within the Exchange Management Console, this can be done by navigating to
Organization Configuration – Database Management and selecting the database. In the lower section of the
screen, right-click the database copy that you want to be suspended and click “Suspend Database Copy”. Re-
enabling the copy is done by selecting “Resume Database Copy”

In the Exchange Management Shell the same can be accomplished by using the following cmdlets:

Suspend-Mailboxdatabasecopy –identitiy “[databasename]\[servername]”

Resume-mailboxdatabasecopy –identity “[databasename]\[servername]”

Switching the active database copy

When –for example- you want to do some maintenance on a mailbox server, you can change the active
database copy to another server. From within the Exchange Management Console, this can be done by
navigating to Organization Configuration – Database Management and selecting the database.

Rightclick the “Healty” (passive) database copy and click “Activate database copy”.

These options let’s you override the mount dial behavior, possible values and explanations (from technet)
are:

Lossless If you specify this value, the database doesn’t automatically mount until all logs that
were generated on the active copy have been copied to the passive copy.
Good Availability If you specify this value, the database automatically mounts immediately
after a failover if the copy queue length is less than or equal to 6. If the copy queue length is
greater than 6, the database doesn’t automatically mount. When the copy queue length is less
than or equal to 6, Exchange attempts to replicate the remaining logs to the passive copy and
then mounts the database.
Best Effort If you specify this value, the database automatically mounts regardless of the size
of the copy queue length. Because the database will mount with any amount of log loss, using
this value could result in a large amount of data loss.
Best Availability If you specify this value, the database automatically mounts immediately
after a failover if the copy queue length is less than or equal to 12. The copy queue length is
the number of logs recognized by the passive copy that needs to be replicated. If the copy
queue length is more than 12, the database doesn’t automatically mount. When the copy
queue length is less than or equal to 12, Exchange attempts to replicate the remaining logs to
the passive copy and then mounts the database.

The same can be accomplished from the Exchange Management Shell by using the following cmdlets:

Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase [mailboxdatabasename] -ActivateOnServer [servername] -

MountDialOverride:[none/lossless/goodavailability/bestavailability/besteffort]

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 Reseeding a database copy

When a database copy is suspended, it can be reseeded. By reseeding a database copy, it will be
overwritten with data from a source server or DAG. From within the Exchange Management Console, this
can be done by navigating to Organization Configuration – Database Management and selecting the
database.

In the lower section of the screen, select the currently suspended mailbox copy and choose “Update
Database Copy”. In the wizard, choose a source server or alternate DAG for reseeding the database. Also,
you can choose whether target files need to be deleted and reseeded, or whether the reseeding should be
stopped for the particular file. Last, you can choose whether the database copy should be unsuspended.

Pages:
Exchange, Microsoft cluster, DAG, database availability group, exchange, exchange 2010, mailbox role

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