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I agree with Joe on this one.� I attended a meeting with Microsoft in regards to Exchange and AD Disaster recovery.� They had EMC, and a Business continuity planning company that specialized in developing plans for crisis.� This � day meeting educated me a lot on the Topic of Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity, and identified both management and technical issues that needed to be addressed in any plan.� The Microsoft part of the presentation was stock on standard methods to recover AD & Exchange.� I found the EMC presentation the most interesting technically because they demonstrated the ability to keep Exchange running and introduced some interesting ways to make cutting over to the hot site a less traumatic event.� (I am sure Compaq & the other vendors can do this as well).�
Couple points I would make are below based on Scope.
Business Continuity
I would recommend that you contract out this function because there are many companies that specialize in developing plans and figuring out the business requirements and risks that need the most attention.� When it comes to the output or plan, the company that Microsoft allowed to demonstrate to me, developed a play card much like a sports team uses to call plays.� The entire process fit on the card, so there were no manuals to maintain and allow to get out of date.� I assume this allowed the everyone to get on board easier, and focus not on the technical weeds, but the most important points.
Technical
When it comes to AD you need to make sure you can recover deleted accounts and restore groups.� I suggest investing in a backup solution like Quest or COMValut. FSMO and DNS servers are important to have a bare metal recovery process.� Remember, if you Seize the FSMO role, you can’t bring back the old server until you remove it from the forest. MS now recommends Anti-Virus on DC’s, just don’t scan the SYSVOL.
Exchange: When in a mixed (5.5 2Kx) environment don’t lose the RUS, have a bare metal restore plan for that.� You will also need a mailbox recovery tool because if you don’t have one you will need a forest to recover the mailbox.� There might be a way to mount the storage group in such a way to recover the mailbox.
All backups use MFT so at a minimum you should use NT backup to make backups of file, exchange, and database.� Shadow Copy Service is also a great network service for empowering your end users.
Todd �
From: joe
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To add on to Rick's answer. I don't know what process you have been through already James but if this is the beginning of the process you may want to change your direction a little.
You need to approach your business and find out what kind of recovery time they want and then what kind of a recovery time they need [1]. Then start looking at what you can get to with various exchange designs. You will have to know how fast do they need "current" email capability, e.g. send message to fred right now. Also you will need to know how fast they need historic info [2]. This will vary greatly for companies. Some companies need current all of the time but can lose historic for hours or days. Some need historic every hour but can go without current for several hours. Some need both right away and of course some can go a day without either. Finally you could have a company where some groups don't care much at all and some use email as their lifeblood, this seems to be the norm and defeats people who want a homogenious design unless overall they can make recovery very very quick. It completely depends on the company and the groups and functions within the company and how much money is available.
Once you know what kind of recovery is required, you can look at the different mechanisms required to achieve it and report back ball park figures to the business. At which point you will probably get redefinitions of what is wanted and needed. I haven't met many business people willing to pay for true DR the way they want it. :o)
All that to say is that your SLA/SLO or whatever you want to call it will require a specific design which could have serious influence over how you backup/restore/recover. You could easily find that restoring the data from tape isn't that important so could get a solution that takes 2 days as long as people can send emails in real time. You may find you need a hot backup 25 miles from the "real" exchange server.
You don't want to come up with a design and then have the business say, well that isn't what we need and then redesign.
joe
[1] Want and need will be different values because no one ever really seems to want only what they need but they all have an issue differentiating between want and need.
[2] Historic defined as everything prior to the loss of the system.
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rick Boza I’m not sure what you mean by
‘directly from the database to another server.’
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Title: Re: Exchange OT:
