Exchange-Genie

Part 2 Standalone Server using /RecoverServer switch

Now that we have used database portability to recover a database that has been replicated by Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) I want to move onto one of the 2 remaining methods utilizing the /recoverServer switch.

There are many different scenarios we can come up with related to recovering Exchange 2007 but I will keep this basic for the blog.

TEST:
Configure 2 standalone mailbox servers which use Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) and the source server has a catastrophic problem that renders it useless. I will then run setup /recoverserver on the scr target machine to bring our Exchange server online.

Environment:
1 Windows 2003 SP2 DC/GC
1 Exchange 2007 CAS/HUB
2 Exchange 2007 MAILBOX SERVERS

Lets start by identifying information about using the /recoverserver switch
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123496.aspx

When do we want to use this?
When a server has been completely lost and we want to bring the SCR target online with the same name to midigate client configuration.

Lets begin:

I currnetly have 2 mailbox server VMmbx1 and SCRTarget

I hope this is not confusing but SCRTarget will be the source and VMmbx1 will be our target.

Our first step is to Enable SCR replication
Enable-StorageGroupCopy -StandbyMachine vmmbx1 -ReplayLagTime 0.0:5:0 -TruncationLagTime 0.0:10:0

The above command enabled replication from our source SCRTarget to the replica VMmbx1

Now that the logs have been replicated and the database seeded I will turn off my Exchange server called ScrTarget and perform a recovery on VMmbx1

Start the Recovery Process

we start by using the restore-storagegroupcopy command
Restore-StorageGroupCopy -Identity scrtarget\recover -StandbyMachine vmbx1 -Force

**Note we had to use the -force switch since the source system has been powered off **

Next we need to uninstall exchange from our target server this can be done from the gui or command line, I will use the command line here to uninstall Exchange

I have my Exchange binaries located D:\177.3

From the target server VMmbx1 I need to remove Exchange so that I can run setup /recoverserver

D:\177.3>Setup /M:Uninstall

3. Reset ad account

Most documentation I found states you only need to reset the computer account before we change the name, when I did my testing I had to remove the computer account before it would allow me to change the name of my server.

**Note if you have to remove the computer account you will need to add it to the Exchange Server and Exchange Install Servers group after the reboot and a new computer account is created **

4. Rename server

5. After changing the server name we need to reboot the server

6. Next we need to run setup /recoverserver

D\177.3> setup /recoverserver

This will start the Exchange recovery install and bring our original source server back online.

**Note The logical drive structure should be the same **

If the database does not mount (most likely will not) we need to use eseutil to recover the database.

lets check to see if we have a clean shut down.

ESEUTIL /MH d:\scr\sg2\data\vmmbx1-sg2-db1.edb (path to edb file)

notice we have Dirty Shutdown and will need to recover the database

We now need to run Eseutil /R to recover the database

ESEUTIL /R E00(Zero Zero or whatever the logs file leads with) /l D:\SCR\SG2\Logs /S D:\SCR\SG2\Data

Notice we recieve an error which requires us to add the /a switch to recover the database

After the repair has run lets check our database status.

ESEUTIL /MH d:\scr\sg2\data\vmmbx1-sg2-db1.ed

We now have a clean shutdown of our database

Lets attempt to mount the database

We can see that our database mounted and we have the same server danme so no client configuration would need to change.

If we look at our recipient configuration we can see that our mailboxes confirm they still remain on SCRTarget.

We see our user Jodie Bartos mailbox belongs to Scrtarget

Lets attempt to logon to her mailbox via OWA and Outlook 2007 to see if we have any problems.