One popular observation that can be made in a CCR, LCR or even a SCR environment, all center around the status of the storage group copies. Take Figure 1 for example, you can see that the health of the storage groups is listed as Initializing under the Copy Status column.

Figure 1: Storage Group Status in Exchange Management Console

The same thing can be seen when running the Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus cmdlet, as you can see in Figure 2, where the SummaryCopyStatus property is shown as Initializing.

Figure 2: Storage Group Status in Exchange Management Shell

I remember first seeing this a long time ago after constructing a new test CCR environment for a customer. In fact, before I realized that the storage group copy status was set to ‘initializing’, I had actually attempted to move the Clustered Mailbox Server (CMS) between the two cluster nodes using the Exchange Management Shell, only to experience a failure of this particular cmdlet. It was then that I examined the properties of the storage groups via the Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus cmdlet.

The case where the storage group copy status is set to ‘initializing’ is actually quite normal in some specific cases, most notably in test environments. The main reason for this is that a transaction log file has not been processed by the system. In my case, I’d literally just created new mailbox databases and then attempted to move the CMS between cluster nodes. The newly created mailbox databases had not yet generated any transactions and thus transaction logs, hence the status display of ‘initializing’. The quickest way around this particular issue is to dismount and then remount each mailbox database. This act causes transaction log roll to occur and therefore creates a transaction log.

If you decide to install Exchange Server 2010 using GUI all Schema, AD and Domain changes will be done automatically, however in a large environment where we have different administrative roles for each component we may need to prepare the schema and domain using different accounts. You will also want to control the replication process. In this kind of scenario the command-line becomes a requirement.

You will notice that we are not installing Exchange Server 2010 in a current environment with legacy exchange servers (Exchange Server 2000/2003). Because of this, we are going to prepare your lab for a pure Exchange Server 2010 environment. These are the steps to prepare our Schema, AD, and domain using command-line:

1. Open Command Prompt and go to the root directory of Exchange Server 2010 installation files.

2. To prepare the Schema, we must have SchemaAdmins permissions, and run the following command: Setup /PrepareSchema, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

3. Time to create the Exchange Organization, we can accomplish that running the following command: Setup /PrepareAD /OrganizationName:<Your-Organization-Name>, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

4. The last step is to prepare the domain. The general rule to follow is to prepare the domain when we will have an Exchange Server or mailbox enabled users in the designated domain. The following command can be used to prepare the current domain: Setup /PrepareDomain, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Now that we created the Exchange Organization we can install a server using command line, using the following syntax:

Setup /Mode:Install /Roles:<Possible values are: Mailbox, HubTransport, ClientAccess, UnifiedMessaging, EdgeTransport, and/or ManagementTools>

Let’s take a look at the PowerControls ExtractWizard in action. We’ll use it here to retrieve IS data from a DAT tape containing a 15GB mixture of file system data and MS Exchange 2000 IS data. The Wizard first asks if you are extracting the IS from a ,BKF file, or from a tape. In figure 1, you can see that the tape option is going to be used in this example. The tape used here was saved using Windows 2000 Backup, but Ontrack claim compatibility with several other backup applications. If you are considering buying the product, you will need to make sure that your backup package is supported by this utility.

Fig. 1 – Specifying the data source.

The ExtractWizard now reads all the data contained on the tape, attempting to locate an Exchange IS backup. This would probably be a good time to make yourself a cup of tea, because it actually takes rather a long time. My DAT tape contained some 15GB of data and it took the application approximately 45 minutes to locate it. Once the IS data has been found, you are then asked to specify which of the IS data files you intend to recover. In figure 2, you can see that I’ve selected the Exchange 2000 Private Information Store, Priv1.edb .

Fig. 2 – Specifying the data files to recover.

Next, you will need to provide the location that you want the data files to be restored to. You will have to navigate to this location later when you use the main PowerControls application to examine the data contained in the files, so pick somewhere memorable. In figure 3, I have selected the C:\TEMP directory as the location for the files, but the ExtractWizard will actually create it’s own folder tree within this directory.

Fig. 3 – Specifying the restore location.

Once you’ve selected the restore directory, the ExtractWizard rewinds the tape and reads the entire contents again. It takes just as long as it did before, so don’t wait around expecting anything to happen just yet. Time for another cup of tea, perhaps? When the IS data files you selected earlier have been recovered, you will be rewarded with the dialog box shown in figure 4.

Fig. 4 – The Exchange IS Copy Progress dialog box.