Really?

Care to share the experiences? I'm actively specing out Dell/EMC gear for a
project and anything I know ahead of time will help. Offlist is fine, too.

------------------------------------------------------
Roger D. Seielstad - MCSE
Sr. Systems Administrator
Inovis - Formerly Harbinger and Extricity
Atlanta, GA


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Edgington, Jeff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
> Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2003 9:01 AM
> To: Exchange Discussions
> Subject: RE: Exchange 2000 Recovery
> 
> 
> Actually... most of the problems were a result of the SAN and it's
> failures.  Of the 5 sites that had this type of SAN, 4 had problems.
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roger Seielstad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
> Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2003 8:00 AM
> To: Exchange Discussions
> Subject: RE: Exchange 2000 Recovery
> 
> 
> I'd call that more of a good reason not to use clusters.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Roger D. Seielstad - MCSE
> Sr. Systems Administrator
> Inovis - Formerly Harbinger and Extricity
> Atlanta, GA
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Tony Hlabse [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 10:04 PM
> > To: Exchange Discussions
> > Subject: Re: Exchange 2000 Recovery
> > 
> > 
> > Good advertisement to not use Dell. 
> > 
> > ----- Original Message ----- 
> > From: "Edgington, Jeff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To: "Exchange Discussions" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 9:41 PM
> > Subject: RE: Exchange 2000 Recovery
> > 
> > 
> > I'm the poor schmuck that became VERY practiced at doing 
> recoveries in
> > this domain.  We were initially told to move from three E5.5 
> > servers to
> > 1 clustered Dell SAN.  My first comment was 'what if this 
> unbreakable
> > setup breaks in a way that the diagnostics on the SAN 
> doesn't detect a
> > problem... I'll end up with 8700 people without e-mail'... 
> I was told
> > "that can't happen"... well, it did... I did at least 6 
> > recoveries in a
> > 12 month span with 2 being all 8700 mailboxes and the others 
> > being 4300
> > each time.  This FINALLY convinced the people with money that this
> > wasn't a smart strategy and they finally allowed me to move 
> > back to the
> > 'many small servers' approach that I prefer... yes, I take a 
> > hit on SIS
> > (8700 mailboxes on currently 6 production servers... I'm backing up
> > 200GB nightly.. full backups)... since our move back to 
> off-the-shelf
> > (but MS HCL hardware) servers, we've had no outages.  Those 
> in our org
> > that are still using the Dell/Cluster approach continue to 
> experience
> > constant problems.
> > 
> > John is a little off with his description... this is our current
> > approach and it seems to work very well in my test restores.  
> > (this was
> > developed during my nightmare, er experience with the 
> > recoveries of last
> > year).
> > 
> > We keep an offline restore domain that contains our recovery 
> > servers...
> > these same servers are the target for my backups of the production
> > servers... this way in the case of a restore I am running 
> the restore
> > from the local drive on the recovery server as opposed to over the
> > network or from tape (we backup to files on hard drive).  
> We also dump
> > VIP mailboxes to PST files nightly (perl script that uses 
> > exmerge... 93
> > mailboxes)
> > 
> > Restore steps with our config... this is based on a couple MS
> > whitepapers... I can dig them up if anyone is interested 
> > (don't remember
> > the titles)
> > 
> > 1.  production db or sg goes down.
> > 
> > 2.  determine if the db/sg can be remounted without data 
> > loss... if not,
> > continue.
> > 
> > 3.  copy production TLOGS to a safe location on the recovery 
> > server for
> > that production server.
> > 
> > 4.  reset the dbs on the production server so that the 
> people on these
> > dbs now at least have mail service back (empty mailboxes)
> > 
> > 5.  Start restore of dbs on the recovery server.  (making 
> sure not to
> > checkmark 'last backup' or 'mount db'... start exmerge of VIP 
> > mailboxes
> > back into the reset mailboxes on the production server.
> > 
> > 6.  Once the restore completes, copy the production TLOGS into the
> > templog dir and run eseutil /cc against the location that has the
> > restore.env file (templog location).... this now gets your 
> restored db
> > back to the point in time just before the crash.
> > 
> > 7.  Mount the restored db on the recovery server to make sure all is
> > well... if so, dismount and copy this restored db back to the 
> > production
> > server as a different name (priv1.edb.rst for example)
> > 
> > 8.  Once all restored dbs are copied to the production 
> > server, dismount
> > the reset dbs and rename them.  (mark them for overwrite)... 
> > now rename
> > the restored dbs back to their original names.
> > 
> > 9.  Mount the restored dbs on the production server.. your users now
> > have their original mailboxes (rules, permissions and all) but are
> > missing the mail that delivered in the time between (4) and (9).
> > 
> > 10.  Copy the reset dbs to the recovery server and mount them there.
> > 
> > 11. Exmerge out the last 24 hours of the mailboxes on the reset dbs
> > (that are now on the recovery server).
> > 
> > 12.  Exmerge the PSTs from (11) back into the production servers....
> > recovery complete.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > jeff e.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Roger Seielstad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 2:54 PM
> > To: Exchange Discussions
> > Subject: RE: Exchange 2000 Recovery
> > 
> > 
> > I'm more interested in how often he has hardware failures. It sounds
> > like a
> > common event!
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------------
> > Roger D. Seielstad - MCSE
> > Sr. Systems Administrator
> > Inovis - Formerly Harbinger and Extricity
> > Atlanta, GA
> > 
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Chris Scharff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
> > > Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 3:45 PM
> > > To: Exchange Discussions
> > > Subject: Re: Exchange 2000 Recovery
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Doesn't play hell with your SIS?
> > > 
> > > On 1/8/03 13:20, "John W. Luther" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Hey. 
> > > 
> > > We have multiple small exchange servers that do their backups 
> > > to recovery
> > > servers that have several mirrored drives so no single 
> > > production server has
> > > any of its backups on the same drive mirror.  With our 
> > > database size limit
> > > we have one recovery server for every three mail servers. In 
> > > addition we
> > > have at least one "hot spare" mail server. 
> > > 
> > > When there is an outage we note which folks are affected and 
> > > then recreate
> > > their (now empty) mailboxes on the recovery server to get 
> > > them back into
> > > email.  We then Exmerge the backed-up mail out of the backups 
> > > into the new
> > > mailboxes.  Some tlog juggling has to be done in order to 
> > > recover all mail,
> > > but it is fairly strait forward. 
> > > 
> > > Each of our servers costs ~6K using "off the shelf" 
> > > components. We learned
> > > the value of lots of small servers when our Dell PowerEdge 
> > > equipment crapped
> > > out on us repeatedly early last year.
> > > 
> > > You could probably do this with  three servers, then.  One 
> > > for production,
> > > one for recovery/backups and one hot spare.  Under your 
> > limit, though?
> > > Well, I guess that would depend on your shopping ability and 
> > > the components
> > > you choose.
> > > 
> > > John 
> > > 
> > > John W. Luther 
> > > Systems Administrator 
> > > Computing and Information Services 
> > > University of Missouri - Rolla 
> > > 
> > > At 11:02 AM 1/8/2003 -0800, Newsgroups wrote: 
> > > >I am not aware of a budget but when I mentioned the 
> solution from 
> > > >"Marathon Technologies" they almost fell off their chairs.  
> > > I think they 
> > > >want to spend somewhere from $3k to $7K (Not sure, as they 
> > > have not told 
> > > >me anything).  I told them that for that price the best 
> > > thing they could 
> > > >do is have another server and do a daily restore of the 
> > > database on that 
> > > >box and if the main server dies put up the new one instead.  
> > > What do you 
> > > >think?  Any other ideas? 
> > > > 
> > > >Thanks 
> > > > 
> > > >-----Original Message----- 
> > > >From: Chris Scharff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
> > > >Posted At: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 10:48 AM 
> > > >Posted To: Exchange Newsgroups 
> > > >Conversation: Exchange 2000 Recovery 
> > > >Subject: Re: Exchange 2000 Recovery 
> > > > 
> > > >Seamless, transparent, automatic and cheap? Don't believe 
> > > such a high 
> > > >availability solution exists. Even overspeccing a single box 
> > > to ensure 
> > > >it's 
> > > >fully redundant gets rather expensive on a per user basis 
> > > for only 180 
> > > >users. What are the actual requirements surrounding the 
> > solution and 
> > > >what 
> > > >budget has been proposed to implement it? 
> > > > 
> > > >On 1/8/03 12:27, "Newsgroups" 
> > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > >We are looking into different methods of recovery from 
> > > Exchange 2000.  I 
> > > > 
> > > >know there are several ways of doing this.  We want to 
> be able to 
> > > >recover w/ out any user interaction (by that we mean it would be 
> > > >transparent to them and they don't want to be down for 4 to 
> > > 6 hours). 
> > > >We have about 180 users.  I know we can cluster them but 
> > > they don't want 
> > > > 
> > > >to go that route because of the cost.  Will software or hardware 
> > > >replication work and be transparent or are there any other 
> > > technologies 
> > > >that you may be aware of? 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > 
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