Exchange 2013

Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery within Exchange 2013

High Availability, although awesome,
may not provide protection against
every possible failure or disaster

You need to have a data protection

plan for disaster recovery of your
Exchange data

Data Protection Planning

• To plan properly for every sort of problem requires

complex planning that can only begin with a
review of possible options
Data Protection Planning

Solutions and terminology to consider:

– Backup Technology Support (Windows Server Backup)
– System Center Data Protection Manager
– Continuous Data Protection
– Server Recovery
– Recovery Database
– Database Portability
– Dial Tone Portability

Built-in Backup Technology Support

• With early versions of Exchange, the moment you

installed it on a server, the backup tool
(NTBackup) on that server would automatically be
able to backup your Exchange databases
– These were called Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) streaming
backups and the solution was limited in many ways (free backup
solutions from Microsoft always have been)

Built-in Backup Technology Support

With Exchange 2010 (and now 2013), ESE

streaming backup is no longer supported, however,
Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) backups are
supported (which is a faster solution overall)
VSS Writer Changes in 2013

• Exchange 2007 and 2010 included two VSS writers

– One writer in the Microsoft Exchange Information Store and the other
inside the Microsoft Exchange Replication service

• With Exchange 2013 all functionality is now in the

Microsoft Exchange Replication service
– The new writer is called the Microsoft Exchange Writer
– Used by Exchange-aware VSS-based applications to backup both active
and passive database copies

Windows Server Backup

• Exchange 2013 has a VSS plug-in that allows it to

work with Windows Server Backup and get a VSS-
based backup
– The new plug-in is called WSBExchange.exe and is installed by default

• These backups are the VOLUME level, meaning they

capture the entire volume, however you can restore
only Exchange data (and you can restore to the
original location or an alternate location) but not
directly to a recovery database (RDB)

• Only full backup scan be taken

Data Protection Manager (et al.)

• System Center Data Protection Manager (SC DPM)

2012 is designed to provide Continuous Data
Protection (CDP) for Exchange

• Third-party solutions to consider:

– Dell AppAssure 5
– Veeam Backup and Replication
– CommVault Simpana
Server Recovery

• Most of the settings for an Exchange Server are

stored in Active Directory

• To recover a lost server you use the

Setup /m:RecoverServer switch

Recovery Database (RDB)

• A recovery database (RDB) is a special mailbox database

that allows you to mount a restored database and extract
data from it over to a production database

• The benefit of the RDB is that you can restore a mailbox or

individual mailbox items without upsetting the normal flow
of your production databases (which are still mounted and
working)

• You create an RDB through the EMS

Using a Recovery Database

• You can use an RDB to recover data through one of the

following:
– Same or alternate server dial tone recovery
– Mailbox recovery (copy to a target folder or merge with another mailbox)
– Specific item recovery

• To create a recovery database you use the following EMS

command:

• New-MailboxDatabase –Recovery –Name RDB1 –Server ServerMB1

Database Portability and Dial Tone Recovery

• You can move and mount any database to any other

Mailbox server within your Exchange organization (must be
the same organization) thanks to database portability

• Dial Tone Recovery allows you to get your people up and

running with mailboxes but their existing mailbox data is
missing
– You restore the mailbox data into the recovery database and merge the two
when you are ready

Scenario: SpyTechPrime’s Data Protection Plan

• We are currently utilizing high availability through a DAG

group for in-house server protection

• We will increase our redundancy in-house (CAS array, load

balancers, router-redundancy, etc.) and use JBOD arrays
for greater storage redundancy and fault tolerance

Scenario: SpyTechPrime’s Data Protection Plan

We will expand this solution to include a secondary

datacenter site and will utilize 3 passive copies of the data
for our active database
– Note: This may seem a bit “bleeding edge” in terms of leaving the crutch of a
true backup, but SpyTechPrime is not the first to do this

• We will utilize a third-party cloud-based solution for full

archive and discovery of email