Exchange 2010 DAG

just to get ourselves started we're looking at creating a dag between the two servers that are currently in Los Angeles so in our scenario you recall that we have the c2c bullet com domain and within that domain on the Los Angeles side we have a server that's called lax 2k10 kaz hub 1 and we also have two mailbox servers Lae x2k 10 mb 1 and l AE x2k 10 mb 2 so what we're going to do just to get our feet wet here with creating our first dag is we're going to establish a dag between the two mailbox servers in Los Angeles and they both have production databases already in play there's lae X 2 K 10 MB one database and lae X 2 K 10 MB 2 database these were created when we set up the servers and we simply just change the names in order to match the server names it makes it easier so that you know which database you're playing with in this case all of our mailboxes are actually on lae x 2k 10 MB 1 so the second database is not really a production database so all we're going to do in this case is form the dag add the 2 mailbox servers to the dag and then create a replica of the lae x 2k 10 MB 1 production database that replica will go on the second server all right so let's jump over to our exchange environment and let's get this started so we're actually on the LAX to Kate n caz hub one server and sometimes when you get lost as far as what server you're working on it's good to make sure so we can check here la e X 2 K 10 K hub one which is part of the C 2 C bullet com domain and we're actually looking at some of the set up for this just so it's clear how we have things worked out you'll note that we have two different sites and two different subnets so the LA subnet is the 10 Network the 10 xxx and the New York subnet is the 192.168.1.0 set up we have domain controllers in each one la d c1 and nydc1 obviously in a real production environment you're going to want multiple domain controllers for redundancy we're actually talking about high availability we're talking about redundancy and resiliency and it would be sort of silly in a production environment if you didn't have that for your active directory remember exchange works off of Active Directory so if you don't have redundancy when it comes to domain controllers DNS global catalogs things of that sort well your exchange isn't going to work too well either so keep that in mind in our case being that this is a lab setup we'll stick with the single domain controllers especially because with our hyper-v servers we only have so much room on the hyper-v servers for multiple systems and so we're trying to make the most use of our servers by putting more exchange servers on them now as for the exchange servers if we look here we can see that we have two calves hub servers so we have one in LA and we have one in New York at this point we'll be discussing high availability for non mailbox server roles in a future lesson but these are each in their separate sites and on separate servers and then if we go to our mailbox for server configuration you can see that we have four different mailbox servers we have two in la mb 1 & mb 2 and we have two in New York MB 1 and NB 2 and each of these has a single database on them you can see the database copy down here currently there are no replicas all of the copy statuses say that they're mounted but none of them are currently in a database availability group so you don't actually create that under server configuration you go up to organization configuration and click mailbox there here you can see the different databases again and then we choose database availability groups so at this point we're going to use the wizard to create a new database availability group we click new database availability group the wizard comes up we have to provide a name remember it can be 15 characters we'll call it L a dag one and at this point we have to provide a witness server and a witness directory if we don't do this one will be chosen for us so in our case being that the dag is going to be in LA we're going to use the caz hub server as our witness server so we select the checkbox so we'll put in the LA IX 2k10 caz hub 1 and the domain is c2c bullet for the fully qualified domain name as for the witness directory we can indicate the path to the directory that we want created on the witness server however it will create one by default so we'll leave this blank and let it just create the default path we click new and it's as simple as that and again you can see here that the new dash database availability group commandment was used it indicated the name and the witness server itself but did not indicate the IP address so one will be provided through DHCP we click finish and you can see that the witness directory is here it's under C backslash dag file share witnesses backslash la da g1 dot C to see bullet comm ok so we have our witness server here currently there are no member servers in this dag so if we right-click and we click manage database availability group membership we click Add and we're going to choose the two la servers and we say okay and then we click manage all right and both servers were added in doesn't look like we have any problems you can see the commandlets there as well for adding in additional members to the database availability group we click finish now you can see we have our member servers listed out here we also now have the dag network set up we can expand this out and this is all part of the clustering aspects that have been added in again keep in mind we did not set up clustering we simply set up the database availability group and added members and so behind the scenes the clustering aspects were added in we can see the subnets in this case we have the single 10 subnet it's up we see the network interfaces we can see that they're up so we're pretty pleased to see that everything is up and running there certainly is some configuration we can do here we can go into the properties of the dag Network and we can look at the subnet itself enable replication is checked we can play around with this and look at all of the different properties and see how this is working keep in mind too that if we want we can go back and we can add additional members to this database availability group so this is not a one-time situation where you only have one chance to pick your servers as you add servers to the mix and you want to add them into the database availability group you can do that we don't have replicas of our databases just yet let's go back to database management and you recall that we have this Lae x2k 10 MB one database and you can see here that we have only a single database copy on our la e x2k 10 MB 1 server and it's mounted and we see it's the activation preference of one all right so if we right-click the database itself you'll note this option add mailbox database copy this won't be here if we did not set up the database availability group and put the servers in there in fact if we click let's say the New York one you'll notice we don't have that option but for this database that's there now if you don't see it there initially just right-click in here and click refresh that may be the problem as long as the servers were added to the database availability group it shouldn't be a problem but you might just need to refresh we right-click we choose add mailbox database copy and we need to choose the server that we're going to make the copy on currently we only have one copy on our Lae x2k 10 MB 1 server we click browse and you can see that we only have one other server that we can create a copy on now this dispels the thought that perhaps we could also choose our own server and create a copy of the database to perhaps another disk on the same server that reminds us of LCR local continuous replication and that's what we had with exchange 2007 that's not the case here if you do want a copy of that data if you want a replica you're going to need to put it on a separate server so we don't do disk to disk within the same server in exchange 2010 even with a database availability group so we only have one other server to choose from there it is our Lae x2k 10 MB 2 server we say ok and we click Add and there we go and again you can see the PowerShell command for that we click finish and now we can see that we have the first copy here that's the active live master copy and then we have the secondary copy on our second server the mailbox server mb2 it's healthy according to the copy status and the activation preference is - now that comes in handy when you start adding additional servers to the mix because if we had another server in let's say New York that we add to the database availability group we wouldn't want that one to have the activation preference of - and this local server to have the activation preference of three because then it will actually go in that order if the first server goes down the one in New York would pick up the slack and would become the active and here you have one local that should be the active if the first one goes down so you need to keep track of those activation preference numbers and make sure that the servers are in the proper order of how you would want them to respond if one went down and the next one had to become the active and that's our basic dag configuration now there's a little bit more that we can do here more that we can talk about and we will in a future lesson let's stop at this point because what we've accomplished here in this lesson is going over the prerequisites setting up a database availability group putting two of our members into it and then creating a replica of the data so at this point let's return to the slides let's discuss a few supporting resources that I like and then we'll close out the lesson with a review you

Channel: Pluralsight IT - Training Archive

Views: 49,703

Keywords: Database Availability Group, DAG, Exchange 2010, High Availability

Id: YExo5eqMb68

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2012