Exchange Disaster Recovery/Backups

ZuG · 14 Sep 2009 at 16:45

Hi,
We run exchange 2007 in our office. However, I have now been given the task of having a DR system/process that will allow users to have their mail again in a couple of hours should the building get blown up, get burned down etc etc.
We have colo hosting in a couple of DCs around the country so I want to have exchange here in the office and somehow backed up to a hot spare in one of our DCs (we just backup the server at the moment to a file, so recovery maybe lengthy)
Would it be better to run Virtualised servers (performance issues) or possibly run something that constantly syncs the two exchange servers?

Has anybody done something similar before?
Thanks,
Mark

iaind · 14 Sep 2009 at 17:06

What sort of bandwidth do you have available to the colocation sites?

We use Doubletake, its pretty poor in terms of reliability but fundamentally it works OK. Replicates our 40gb Exch2007 mail store over about 200k bandwidth no problem. We use the Livewire product which requires recovery, but they do have various live failover offerings. Look at the virtual recovery assistant

ZuG · 14 Sep 2009 at 17:18

we have about 3mb link to our DC...

Is there a Microsoft way of doing it?

mr.bond · 14 Sep 2009 at 17:27

Used to use a product called Neverfail, now use Exchange HA

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124721.aspx

We've got the mailbox servers in CCR and two front end nodes for CAS load balanced - all seems to work well when we performed some test failovers for the CCR.

Deathwish · 14 Sep 2009 at 18:59

What about a CCR setup?

iaind · 14 Sep 2009 at 19:50

ZuG said:
we have about 3mb link to our DC...

Is there a Microsoft way of doing it?

Yup, although you need to be on enterprise IIRC. Third party products like doubletake normally will manage better bandwidth use and be more up to date. The built in replication uses transaction log shipping so you'll be up to 5mb out of date. Products like doubletake will use real time byte level replication at the file system level, so will be up to date to the nearest byte if you have enough bandwidth to avoid queueing

ethos · 14 Sep 2009 at 20:34

Exchange DR is one of the reasons I'm keen to virtualize next year...

RSR · 14 Sep 2009 at 20:41

I'm doing some testing with Exchange at the mo for DR. Recovering it from a number of states and using a number of tools from Backup Exec thru to Snap Manager.

Its prooving to be very interesting.

What type of line is it? Also with Exchange latence needs to be kepted under 20ms other wise its starts to get a little unhappy. How big is the DB? Do you use public folders? Whats the daily average log size? Also what are the users like? Are you going to be using DRS?

Andy

oddjob62 · 14 Sep 2009 at 21:26

I've got a CCR Geolcuster set up between our head office and our other office, although we do have a 100meg LL between offices. Not had to use it for full DR, but i've done test failovers to the remote site. We also have MS DPM backing up every hour.

ZuG · 15 Sep 2009 at 10:47

I think CCR maybe the way to go. I have a ping of around 18ms to our DC.. Will this be enough? Other than another licence for Exchange, would I need to purchase any more CALs(I assume not)?

ZuG · 15 Sep 2009 at 11:27

urgh, it seems I need Windows Server Enterprise licences and Exchange enterprise licences... Sounds expensive.

RSR · 15 Sep 2009 at 11:44

ZuG said:
urgh, it seems I need Windows Server Enterprise licences and Exchange enterprise licences... Sounds expensive.

That’s correct. Exchange Enterprise not inc cals is roughly around 5.5k and Server Enterprise is around 1.5k. Have you looked at a virtualised solutions?

Andy

ZuG · 15 Sep 2009 at 12:52

It's an option. However, I wouldn't like to copy an image of the mail server over our internet line every day or week really as it would be too big. I am more of a Linux person so I am unsure of the best practices for Windows, but is there an rsync equivelant that would only copy the parts of virtual image that has changed?
Thanks,
Mark

iaind · 15 Sep 2009 at 13:17

ZuG said:
It's an option. However, I wouldn't like to copy an image of the mail server over our internet line every day or week really as it would be too big. I am more of a Linux person so I am unsure of the best practices for Windows, but is there an rsync equivelant that would only copy the parts of virtual image that has changed?
Thanks,
Mark

There are various ways - SAN replication or replication software (again, doubletake has a VMWare product)

RSR · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:00

ZuG said:
It's an option. However, I wouldn't like to copy an image of the mail server over our internet line every day or week really as it would be too big. I am more of a Linux person so I am unsure of the best practices for Windows, but is there an rsync equivelant that would only copy the parts of virtual image that has changed?
Thanks,
Mark

What i have setup with our enviroment is we have 2 NetApp SANs which provide Luns over iSCSI VMware server. The data this then SnapMirrored to our DR site nightly. However, this can be scheduled as little or often as possible. If the worse was to happen at our main site, all i would need to do is brake the SnapMirror and Quiesce the luns for the ESXi and Exchange data re attach them to the DR server and its all up and running again. All this can be done with in less then 5 mins.

However, if you had a large bandwith connection to a DR site there is the option for real time v-motion.

I think you may also be supirsed how little data is transfered on a daily basis.

Andy

RSR · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:02

iaind said:
There are various ways - SAN replication or replication software (again, doubletake has a VMWare product)

I agree.

I highly recommend NetApp SANs for this. They are not cheap compared to the like of HP, EMC but you get soo more extra funicationally from them.

Andy

VBN · 15 Sep 2009 at 17:45

andyd said:
I agree.

I highly recommend NetApp SANs for this. They are not cheap compared to the like of HP, EMC but you get soo more extra funicationally from them.

Andy

I agree too, we also use the NetApp Single Mail Box recovery which alllows you to map a previous snapshot and restore any part of a users mailbox down to single emails and just drop them back in their box.

However am currently looking at Equalogic as a possible replacement for my aging FAS270 as the upgrade path and licensing on NetApp is on the expensive side.

ZuG · 16 Sep 2009 at 12:26

our current thinking is to run hyper V with Exchange 2007. Then connect this to some sort of SAN (May look at openfiler?) and use iscsi for the data storage...

We should then be able to backup the OS once a day or even less and rsync the SAN over to our offsite backup storage(possibly another san...)

Any thoughts?

bigredshark · 16 Sep 2009 at 12:44

ZuG said:
our current thinking is to run hyper V with Exchange 2007. Then connect this to some sort of SAN (May look at openfiler?) and use iscsi for the data storage...

We should then be able to backup the OS once a day or even less and rsync the SAN over to our offsite backup storage(possibly another san...)

Any thoughts?

I think I'd be very wary of homebrew solutions like that, you need something which works flawlessly, if you ever need to use it then the situation is likely going to be chaos. Having an off the shelf product with support you can call on is a must in my opinion...

bigredshark · 16 Sep 2009 at 12:46

VBN said:
I agree too, we also use the NetApp Single Mail Box recovery which alllows you to map a previous snapshot and restore any part of a users mailbox down to single emails and just drop them back in their box.

However am currently looking at Equalogic as a possible replacement for my aging FAS270 as the upgrade path and licensing on NetApp is on the expensive side.

It's a fantastic solution but it's not really backup or DR in my opinion, it's more an additional facility before you get to restoring backups or DR. Great for recovering an email somebody accidentally deleted or recovering point in time mailboxes for compliance but less useful in an actual disaster where you still need your backups or DR environment.