Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Disaster Recovery

Although many of the new features in Exchange 2010 are redundant by design and have been designed in that manner, this does not negate the requirement for a reliable disaster recovery plan.

The inherent features of Exchange 2010 will contribute toward maintaining high availability and in doing so provide the first option of recovery during a disaster.

What you may have to recover from:

Many types of failures and disasters may require that the Exchange administrator repair or restore complete Exchange 2010 messaging system. It is important that you have a strategy in place to recover from this kind of situation where you lose the complete infrastructure and sites (including all Exchange servers and all servers that provide external services).

The root causes for these situations could be:

• Act of sabotage / terrorism / War;
• Major catastrophes (Hurricane, flood, fire, earthquake).

When the disaster recovery solution is configured, you will have Exchange 2010 service availability in DR site, however to make it operational you need to have the below infrastructure in place before activating the Exchange 2010 in DR site

• Internet and perimeter connectivity
• Connectivity to International branches (if exist)
• External DNS server
• Reverse proxy
• Domain controller / Global Catalog server
• Pointing Client Access and MX record to DR site

“Dial Tone” Recovery:

The Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 dial tone recovery feature offers the following:

• Provides a limited business continuity solution for complete site loss scenarios.
• Gives users the ability to send and receive e-mail messages, without having access to old data stored on the server, during the recovery process.
• Gives the Exchange administrator time to proceed with the recovery process to bring historical mailbox data online, without total loss of e-mail functionality.
• Provides users with limited access to their e-mail stored in an offline folder file (.ost file).
• After the recovered database is brought back online, provides the ability to merge the dial tone and recovered databases into a single up-to-date mailbox database.

Exchange 2010 “dial tone” portability further enhances the “dial tone” recovery scenario, by allowing a “dial tone” recovery to take place on any Exchange 2010 mailbox server in the Exchange organization. This allows an alternative server to host the mailboxes of users who were previously on a server that is no longer available. However, the dial tone recovery should only be needed when the complete messaging infrastructure is down. Clients that support Autodiscover, such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2010, will automatically be redirected to the new server without having to manually update the user's profile.

How “Dial Tone” works with database portability:

The Exchange “dial tone” portability feature provides recovery from site-level disasters by:

• Streamlining the creation of dial tone mailboxes on alternate servers.
• Ensuring the users’ access to the new mailbox, by automatically reconfiguring Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or above client profiles.
• Allowing for the merger of the recovered historical data and the “dial tone” mailbox data by means of a wizard, or sequence of management shell tasks.

“Dial tone” portability allows a user's mailbox to be moved without having access to any of the mailbox content. This allows an alternative server to house the mailboxes of users who were previously on a server that is no longer available. With the Outlook and Exchange Autodiscover service, clients are redirected to the new server when they try to connect. Users are then moved to this new server and quickly regain the ability to send and receive e-mail messages.

The detailed step by step guide on how to perform dial tone recovery is outlined at:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979810.aspx

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2013
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• Anonymous
  December 18, 2013
  We are pleased to announce the RTM availability of version 9.0 of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2013
  I’ve written a few blog posts now that get into the deep technical details of Managed Availability. I

• Anonymous
  December 26, 2013
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• Anonymous
  January 07, 2014
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• Anonymous
  January 07, 2014
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• Anonymous
  January 14, 2014
  Recently, we have seen some questions about what the Update-DatabaseSchema cmdlet in Exchange 2013 is

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2014
  This has been a great new feature added in Windows Server 2012 R2. The possible scenario of the usage

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2014
  Many users rely on their smart phones and other mobile devices to access their email and calendar using

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2014
  With Exchange 2013, we released a new data loss prevention (DLP) capability based on deep content analysis

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2014
  Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for download! Please make sure to read the

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2014
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• Anonymous
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  Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 entered the market on September 28, 2003 and continued the great messaging

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2014
  Now that we understand the load balancing and namespace planning principles and how clients connect in

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2014
  We’re happy to announce updates to the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant ! These updates offer you

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2014
  During my session at the recent Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC), I revealed Microsoft’s preferred

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2014
  With the huge scale environment I currently work in my team has had some difficulty when it comes to

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2014
  I recently did an Exchange 2013 deployment at one of our customers and also integrated with ADRMS so

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2014
  In the last week there have been two big improvements related to CalCheck and OffCAT that will make life

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2014
  I was recently helping a customer in ADRMS design and deployment where we faced an issue with ADRMS URL

• Anonymous
  June 27, 2014
  We are pleased to announce the availability of version 9.1 of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2014
  Recently I was working for ADRMS integration with Exchange which is rather simple however it became quite

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2014
  Probes are one of the three critical parts of the Managed Availability framework (monitors and responders

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2014
  In the last related blog post we gave some introduction about Exchange Online Protection (EOP), what

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2014
  The Exchange team is announcing today the availability of our most recent quarterly servicing update

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2015
  Exchange team has written below blog on the remote connectivity analyzer tests for mail flow testing

• Anonymous
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  Exchange team has released a blog about Office 365 best practices analyzer for Exchange 2013 as below

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  February 09, 2015
  Exchange team has written a blog about new Exchange Server deployment assistance as below:
  We’ve

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2015
  After a long wait, the calculator is there. The calculator recommends mailbox and CAS sizing as well

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  Exchange team blogged about post TMG world. R ead the blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2015
  Exchange team blogged about OffCAT as below:
  On Friday, July 19, the OffCAT team released OffCAT version

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  February 13, 2015
  Read the blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/07/16/owa-for-iphone-and-owa-for-ipad

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2015
  Exchange team has released Hosting and Multi-Tenancy Guidance for Exchange Server 2013 document. It is

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2015
  The Exchange team has released the following update rollups to the Download Center. All three releases

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2015
  Exchange team has released a fantastic blog about publishing Exchange 2013 with TMG server.
  Review