Okay... found the problem. Didn't realize that the backup of the Exchange servers weren't the same day as the DC. A little thing where the client server resets its password once a month. It works a whole lot better now.
-Paul -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Maglinger, Paul Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 2:12 PM To: New Exchange List ([email protected]) Subject: [Exchange] Restored Exchange 2010 Mailbox server shows DAG database residing on node not available Testing additional DR scenarios and am running up against this and not really sure how to Google it (after all, this is a lot to type in the search bar). When everything is up and running we have a 3 node DAG. All servers are VMs and 2 nodes (E1 and E2) are at HQ and 1 node (E3) is offsite. We're using Windows Failover Cluster Manager to move to the offsite node in the event of a failure of the 2 HQ servers. In this scenario we are trying to restore and run off the HQ servers in the lab. The lab contains one of our DCs. After restoring E1 and E2 to the lab environment we were unable to login to them until we re-added them to the domain. After that we had to select "Repair Active Directory Object" in the Failover Cluster Manager before the cluster would come up. Now when we look at the EMC the DAG for HQ is not showing up and the database itself is in an unknown state showing that it is mounted on E3. Remember that we only restored E1 and E2. We were doing something somewhat similar less than a year ago when we were trying just to restore and run from E3. The solution then was to create a new database, unmount and rename the new database, then rename the old database to the new database name, and then mount the renamed old database. I can understand this process because we were going from a multi-node DAG to a single server, but now we are restoring 2 nodes out of the 3. Will we have to do something similar here as above, or is there a way to tell Exchange "Look, I know you think you're mounted on E3 but that's not going to happen. You need to go ahead and mount on E1." -Paul
