Hello -

I'm in the process of setting up two new Exchange 2013 Servers on two virtualized, (VMware), Windows 2012 Servers.  I have Exchange 2013 installed on both VM servers, I have the DAG created, along with also the having the Databases created successfully.

I'm eventually going to migrate from a single, bare-metal 2007 Exchange Server, running on Windows 2008 Std, but haven't migrated anything yet as I'm still working to get my new setup executed correctly.

My scenario\question is regarding Storage.  We have an EMC SAN (VNXe 3150). 

Scenario: I have carved out my volumes for each server.  I created a 1TB volume that is going to host the majority of my mailboxes, of which those will be limited to 4GB in size.  This volume is on Exchange 2013 Server 1.  I also created a 500GB volume that is going to host a handful of mailboxes, of which will be unlimited in size.  This volume is on Exchange Server 2.

Question(s): Do I need to set up Database Copies?  Have I errored in my storage setup config here?; (meaning different sized volumes).  Do I need to have each of my volumes, on each server, be the same identical size?  In this case, 1.5 TB, so that each server can potentially host both databases on it's respective volume in the event of a failover.

I'm definitely an Exchange and Clustering novice here.  With that said, I had thought that failover worked such that if one server failed, the volume would failover to the other Exchange Server.  When researching setting up database copies, this seems like each volume is going to host a copy of both databases.  Is that how failover happens within a DAG; (Failover to the other database copy on a completely different volume?)

Sorry for my ignorance here, and I hope I was clear in my explanation.  If anyone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

Thanks very much.

Hello -

I'm in the process of setting up two new Exchange 2013 Servers on two virtualized, (VMware), Windows 2012 Servers.  I have Exchange 2013 installed on both VM servers, I have the DAG created, along with also the having the Databases created successfully.

I'm eventually going to migrate from a single, bare-metal 2007 Exchange Server, running on Windows 2008 Std, but haven't migrated anything yet as I'm still working to get my new setup executed correctly.

My scenario\question is regarding Storage.  We have an EMC SAN (VNXe 3150). 

Scenario: I have carved out my volumes for each server.  I created a 1TB volume that is going to host the majority of my mailboxes, of which those will be limited to 4GB in size.  This volume is on Exchange 2013 Server 1.  I also created a 500GB volume that is going to host a handful of mailboxes, of which will be unlimited in size.  This volume is on Exchange Server 2.

Question(s): Do I need to set up Database Copies?  Have I errored in my storage setup config here?; (meaning different sized volumes).  Do I need to have each of my volumes, on each server, be the same identical size?  In this case, 1.5 TB, so that each server can potentially host both databases on it's respective volume in the event of a failover.

I'm definitely an Exchange and Clustering novice here.  With that said, I had thought that failover worked such that if one server failed, the volume would failover to the other Exchange Server.  When researching setting up database copies, this seems like each volume is going to host a copy of both databases.  Is that how failover happens within a DAG; (Failover to the other database copy on a completely different volume?)

Sorry for my ignorance here, and I hope I was clear in my explanation.  If anyone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

Thanks very much.

 

If you want to configure your Exchange Databases to fail over to another server you will need to setup the storage on both servers exactly the same.  

DAG's work a little differently than your traditional clusters (thank god) where you configured the storage as a shared resource and only 1 server can access it at a time.  That model really only gives you server redundancy and not any storage redundancy.  With this setup you get both server redundancy (multiple servers) and storage redundancy (assuming each server has a different set of physical drives).

[...] With that said, I had thought that failover worked such that if one server failed, the volume would failover to the other Exchange Server.  When researching setting up database copies, this seems like each volume is going to host a copy of both databases.  Is that how failover happens within a DAG; (Failover to the other database copy on a completely different volume?)

 

Yes, with a DAG you will have two (or more) copies of each database. For example:

EXSvr1 - MBXDB1 - up to 1 TB of storage space

EXSvr2 - MBXDB1 - up to 1 TB of storage space

And then a 500 GB volume for each DAG node.

With a DAG, the path must be identical on both nodes (or all nodes) for each respective database.

So MBXDB1 must be on (for example) F:\Databases\MBXDB1\mbxdb1.edb on both DAG nodes.

It would make sense to have identical space on both nodes (although I'm not sure this would be an absolute requirement).