Step by Step Free Guide to Exchange 2010 Disaster Recovery

Disaster or any other issue may occur to the Exchange Servers at any time and they may stop functioning, and that’s why the admins are required to stay prepared with all the troubleshooting mechanisms and disaster recovery plans.

In this post, we will discuss step by step Exchange 2010 Disaster Recovery.

Exchange Server 2010 was equipped with a feature known as “Database Portability”. This feature enabled the mounting of the mailbox database from one Mailbox server to the another within an organization.

Alternates To Database Portability

There are some alternatives which can be used if you don’t want to use the “database portability”.

• “Mailbox Server Recovery” is one of the apt options in most of the disaster scenarios and can be used.
• If your Mailbox server hails from the “Database Availability Group”, then the database can be activated on the other DAG member server which already possesses the replica of the database.

Vital Points Related To Database Portability Usage In The Disaster Recovery Scenario?

If one Mailbox server has failed and you want to mount and you want to mount the database from the failed server to another Exchange server available in the organization, it can easily be done. But, before you leverage the database portability for disaster recovery, it’s important to know about some underlying points pertaining to the Database Portability:

1. The database cannot be a public folder database
2. The mailbox database which you want to mount cannot be an older version of the Exchange Server.
3. The mounting from one mailbox server can be made to another mailbox server only if they both belong to the same organization.

How To Use Database Portability For Disaster Recovery?

Here are the steps which you need to follow for MS Exchange Disaster Recovery through database portability.

1.   Transfer The Database And Log Files To The New Server

First of all, you need to fetch the database and the log files and get them on the server where mounting is going to be done. To do this:

a) Either the database and log files can be restored from the backup

b) Or, the storage that was being used by an old and corrupted server can be attached to the new server

2.    Check the Shutdown State Of the Database

Navigate to and open the “Exchange Management Shell” and navigate to the folder which contains the database file.

To check the database state, run the following command

eseutil /mh „path of the priv.edb” | findstr “State:”

(In the path of priv.edb part, specify the location of the location of the database file)

If it specifies the state of the database as the ” Dirty Shutdown” , but the transaction log files are available, a soft recovery of the database can be performed. Soft Recovery helps in committing any uncommitted transaction logs into the database to avoid any data losses.

However, if the database shows ” Clean Shutdown” as its state and there are no transaction logs, the following step of the soft recovery can be skipped.

Run the following command from the folder which contains the transaction logs and you can replace the E00 with the log file prefix for the database.

[eseutil /r “prefix”<E00> /l <log file location> /d <database location>]

Also, here we have used the /d parameter to define the mailbox database file’s location. If this file is not in the same path as it is on the original server, then you don’t need to define this parameter.

3.   Creating New Mailbox Database 

a) The next step is to create a new mailbox on the Mailbox Server where you are planning to mount the database. To create the new database, you need to specify the paths for the transaction logs and database files which are different from the current location.

G\:New-MailboxDatabase -Server esp-ho-ex2010a -Name name of database-Recovered -LogFolderPath path-Recovered -EdbFilePath path-Recoveredname of edb file.edb

In this command, I have underlined the variables where you need to specify the path and the names.Other than these, you can use the aforementioned syntax.

b) Now copy the log files and database files from their current location to the new location which you while creating the new mailbox database through the above-mentioned command.

c) Mark this database as overwritable using the following command

d)  Now mount the database

[PS] G:\>Mount-Database Name of database

With this command, the mailbox has been successfully mounted, but, still the mailbox users are pointing to the old database name and the old server.

e)  So, now you need to update the attributes for the user accounts so that they can start pointing to the new database server.

[PS] G:\>Get-Mailbox –Old database name | Set-Mailbox –New database name

f) To check whether the user accounts have been updated or not, you can run the following command.

[PS] G:\>Get-Mailbox – New database name

It would show you the list of all the users connected to this database.

Few Vital Points To Consider

• The Outlook 2003 clients would need a manual profile update to be able to connect to the new database 
• The Outlook web users and Outlook  2010/2007 users will automatically connect with the new database 
• You may need to replicate the updated user account attributes through Active Directory

Now, that you clearly comprehended the process to mount the mailbox server to a new one, you can easily overcome the issue when your Exchange Server 2010 gets corrupted or closes down into the “Dirty Shutdown” state. Using the aforementioned steps, you can optimally use the Exchange Server 2010’s “Database Portability” feature and overcome any issues caused by corruption of the Exchange server.