Migration of Stores and Logs to New Disk Array
Our current Exchange environment:
3 backend Exchange servers using Windows clustering
1 frontend Exchange server
2 frontend OWA servers
Our clustered Exchange servers are currently fiber attached to a storage array. We recently purchased a new array and would like to move all of the exchange files to this new array.
Is there some documentation on the best way to do this or does anyone have any experience they can share?
Thanks.
June 20th, 2007 8:10pm
I don't know of any documentation, but this is how I did it in the past:
(I'm assuming your OS and backup softwareare installed on internal drives)
OWA frontends:
I would rebuild the OWA servers from scratch (nice cleanup ). Just reset the AD computer account, rebuild the server using the same computer name, join the domain, install exchange using the disasterrecovery switch.
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Recovering-Failed-Exchange-2003-Member-Server-Using-Disaster-Recovery-Switch.html
If you do not want to rebuild,you can also follow the procedure provided below
Servers that contain mailboxes:
- Full backup the mailstores.
- Dismountall the mailstores on mailservers.
- Stop Exchange Services.
- Run Eseutil /mhon thestores to check if the database had a cleanshutdown.
- File backup the drives. Do not include IFS. DO INCLUDE THE LOGS AND DATABASES.
- Attach the new storage and configure exactly the same partition scheme.
- Restore the filebackup using the original paths
I do not have experience migrating Clustered mailbox servers. The issue with this is that you also need to migrate the quorum. This is normally included in the System State backup. you can however not restore a system state backup in a server with different hardware.
Cheers,
Mark
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June 21st, 2007 2:17pm