HIGH AVAILABILITY AND SITE RESILIENCE IN

EXCHANGE SERVER
You can protect exchange server mailbox databases and the data they contain by
configuring exchange servers and databases for high availability and site resilience. When
planning for providing high levels of service and data availability and support for very large
mailboxes, exchange server is a solution which minimizes cost and complexity of deploying a
highly availability and site resilience.
When you design for high availability, you must factor in the exchange server configuration
and the infrastructure components that Exchange Server requires such as datacenter, the
hardware, the network, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), and the internet. And if
you have only high availability only in Exchange Server and not anywhere else then there is
no true high availability. The general requirements that must be met for deploying high
availability and site resilience are hardware, software, and network requirements.
The primary high availability option for Exchange Server is DAG. A DAG is a logical grouping
of servers that you can use to provide high availability for mailbox databases, and it can
contain up to 16 servers. Each mailbox database has a single active copy on one of the
servers in the DAG. And each mailbox database in a DAG can have one or more passive
copies.
When DAG is first created it has zero members. A minimum of two members is required for
the DAG to provide high availability. Two-member DAGs are reasonably common as a HA
deployment of Exchange, For example in diagram below:
General Requirements
 Domain Name System (DNS) must be running. Ideally, the DNS server should accept
dynamic updates.
 Each Mailbox server in a DAG must be a member server in the same domain.
 Adding an Exchange Mailbox server that’s also a directory server to a DAG is not
supported.
 The name you assign to the DAG must be a valid, available, and unique computer
name of 15 characters or less.

Software Requirements
Each member of a DAG must be running the same operating system. In order to meet the
prerequisites for installing Exchange Server, there are operation system requirements that
must be met. DAGs use windows Failover Clustering Technology, and as a result they require
the Standard or Datacenter version of the Windows server 2012 or higher Operating
Systems.

Network Requirements
DAG must have a single Messaging Application Program Interface (MAPI) Network which is
used by a DAG member to communicate with other servers for example other Exchange
server or directory servers

 Each member of the DAG must have at least one network adapter that’s able to
communicate with all other DAG members.
 Using two network adapters in each DAG member provides you with one MAPI
network and one replication network, with redundancy for the replication network.
 Each DAG member must have the same number of networks.
 Each DAG must have no more than one MAPI network.
 Each network in each DAG member server must be on its own network subnet.

Exchange Environment Configuration

Exchange Environment Value
Exchange Server Version 2019
Global Catalog Server Architecture 64-bit
Server Role Virtualization Yes
High Availability Deployment Yes
Number of Mailbox Servers Hosting Active mailboxes (DAG) 3
Number of Database Availability Groups 1
Mailbox Database Copy Configuration
Mailbox Daatabase Copy Configuration Value
Total number of HA Database Copies (Includes Active) within DAG 3
Total Number of Lagged Database Copy Instances within DAG 1

Site Resiliency Configuration

Site Resiliency Configuration Value
Site Resilient Deployment Yes
Site Resilience User Distribution Model Active/Passive
Site Resilience Recovery Point Objective (Hours) 24

Outage Handling in High Availability : Switchover and Failover

Two mechanisms types for handling outage or downtime in a high availability Exchange
Organization, these are Switchover and Failover. Switchover comes into play when there is
a planned or scheduled downtime or outage of the database, server, or datacenter, typically
for maintenance, hardware upgrades, and windows updates/maintenance.
In Switchover, Outage initiated manually by an administrator by using Exchange Admin
Center or Exchange Management Shell. It involves switching over of one or more active
database copies to other mailbox server in the DAG.
Failover is an automatic response to unexpected outage due to the failure of a database,
server, or datacenter, and it involves automated recovery through moving of the active
database copies to another mailbox servers in the DAG, which was previously a passive
server.