We are planning to replace our Core networking switch in our production environment. I am looking for a best practice option for Exchange to be placed into during this outage. This will be an approximate four hour outage.

Our current environment for Exchange is this:

Exchange 2010 SP3 rollup 8v2 two CAS servers and Three MBX/HT servers.

I read a few articles and they recommended different things, one was to just power down all of the exchange servers before the outage and then bring them back up after the outage. To me this just seems like a bad idea. The other was to put the MBX servers into maintenance mode prior to shutting them down. This seemed more practical.

Can anyone provide feedback, insight, and guidance in this case? Has anyone gone through this type of outage and if so how did you handle your exchange environment and what was your success or failures with the scenario you used?

Thank you

• Edited by DHV655 15 hours 49 minutes ago

What would be the difference between putting the servers into maint mode and shutting them down versus just shutting them down?

When the server is in maintenance mode it moves all the active databases to other DAG members. It pauses the node in the cluster, and sets the DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy mailbox server setting to Blocked. The Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy cmdlet is run for each database hosted by the DAG member, and the cluster core resources will be moved to another server in the DAG if needed. This prevents data bases from auto activating in the case of a server failure. Just powering down an exchange MBX server would cause the active data bases to failover to the alternate server, but once Quorum is lost due to more than half of the servers being shut down, I am not sure how the data bases would react after being brought  back on line. Based on this it seems to me that putting the servers in maintenance mode prior to powering them down would be the safest bet.

TL;DR What I am really looking for is advice or experience from an Admin who has already gone through a similar exercise.

Thanks for your input.

 

if you're worried about how the databases are going to react before shutting the servers down, just suspend the database copies before shutting them down.  They're going to be shut down anyway, so I don't see the need to put them into maintenance mode.

That's a good point. Suspending the Data Base copies would prevent any data from being written and after the MBX server is down the active copy will not be writing anything at all. That will work. Thanks

That's a good point. Suspending the Data Base copies would prevent any data from being written and after the MBX server is down the active copy will not be writing anything at all. That will work. Thanks

Shutting down the passive server prevents copying as well  :) 

And of course, suspending the database copies certainly are not going to hurt you either!

Exchange is pretty resilient, but I understand your concern . Good  Luck.