By Chris Lehr, Senior Microsoft Consultant

At Simpler-Webb, I've deployed about 30 Exchange 2007 organizations since its release. Of those, under 10% of them addressed high availability or disaster recovery planning. Here's why and what 2010 does to address those needs.

Exchange 2007

First, in Exchange 2007, if you wanted a highly available solution, you needed to design it as such from the beginning. If you deployed a single server with all three mailbox roles, you were not able to easily add a second or third server. You needed to configure a new cluster and move mailboxes to it.

Second, when talking High Availability in Exchange 2007, you were talking CCR, or continuous cluster replication. Unfortunately, when designing a CCR solution, only the mailbox role could be clustered. The Hub Transport and Client Access Server roles needed to be deployed elsewhere. The obvious choice for many was an additional piece of hardware.

Even with a highly available mailbox role, the Hub Transport and Client Access Role still had a single point of failure. For most, the way to address this was to get a pair of Hub Transport/CAS servers and load balance them.

So, now we have a highly available four server Exchange organization, but still no Disaster Recovery. In Exchange 2007, this was brought in by SCR (Standby Continuous Replication) in service pack one. SCR allows for a server with an "offline" copy of your databases. Should a disaster be declared, this offline copy could be brought online and users would be able to access email again.

The major downsides of SCR were that it required a fair amount of technical Exchange knowledge to configure, and more importantly, to recover. When you are in the middle of a disaster, this is not the time to type a lot of commands with shaking fingers!

Exchange 2010

Exchange 2010 essentially combined the best of CCR and SCR into one technology, known now as Database Availability Groups (DAGs).

The two biggest improvements of Exchange 2010 DAGs over Exchange 2007 CCR/SCR are that we can now do an incremental deployment and we do not need to split the Hub Transport and Client Access roles off.

This allows for a single server Exchange 2010 environment today with the ability to add a second server next year and later add a third. You can go up to as many 16 copies of your database. Each additional copy increases your high availability possibilities. Additionally, leaving the HT and CAS roles on the same servers means that your licensing and server costs are lower than they would be in an Exchange 2007 environment.

In addition, this same DAG technology can also include DR planning. A single server at a DR location with a copy of your databases can be brought online in the case of a disaster.

As you can see, Exchange 2010 allows you to deploy both a highly available and fault tolerant Exchange environment in fewer steps, with easier administration. In addition, Exchange 2010 has a 70% reduction in IOPS in storage requirements, so the mailbox servers you are utilizing can utilize cheaper storage options. In addition, with three or more copies of your database, Microsoft even recommends moving away from RAID 5 or RAID 10 for your database disks, but instead model a single SATA disk per database and transaction log files.

Exchange 2010 has a lot to offer beyond high availability and disaster recovery. Also, we are currently scheduling both Exchange 2010 design plan projects and implementations and are excited to help our clients realize all the benefits of 2010. If you would like more information, please contact us. Also, check out our Exchange 2010 HA & DR video.  

By Tim Brackett, VP of Services

Management Infrastructure Improvements

If you are a Simpler-Webb Managed Services client, over the last two months you have received notifications of maintenance windows performed on our own systems. These updates have been conducted to improve the core management infrastructure of our Managed Server and Managed Security systems, as well as other internal systems used by Simpler-Webb to deliver consulting and provide ServiceDesk support to our customers. Here’s a quick review of the updates made.

Data Availability and Redundancy

Simpler-Webb recently enhanced its hardware inventory by deploying a new Storage Array Network (SAN) to replace an aging one. The new device has higher capacity and greater redundancy than the older model, both desirable attributes for our production infrastructure. To put this new SAN into production required migration of several SQL Server databases. These databases were, among others, the application data of our core security monitoring systems. A maintenance window was required to migrate this critical data to the SAN. We carefully planned the window, ordering the tasks, benchmarking the data copy speed and evaluating the outage impact to monitoring services. During the windows we successfully completed the migration tasks within the timeframe announced. Most recently the application data from our core security monitoring system (350GB) was migrated in 90 minutes. Our greatest concern is for a clearly defined process when dealing with these critical issues impacting our and your organization. These plans required several iterations reviewed and approved by no less than three business unit owners before enactment.


Enhanced Server Monitoring Performance

Simpler-Webb uses Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to keep eyes on the more than 200 servers under management. Earlier this year Microsoft released a new major revision of this application, which Simpler-Webb has been evaluating in a test environment for the last few months. Plans were made for the production deployment to occur on September 22nd. In preparation, the components of the application were distributed to multiple servers, some physical and some virtual, to improve performance as seen by our managed server team. On the 22nd, we had one major task in our upgrade process that was identified as our point of no return: the database schema conversion required by the new application revision. We estimated in our testing that this point would come about 45 minutes into our maintenance window. It did, and it completed successfully. At that point we had several other tasks necessary to complete the turn-up of the services in production. All tasks occurred as expected and our maintenance window was closed 5 minutes ahead of schedule, with all 200+ servers returning to active monitoring.

Still remaining were the agent updates for each managed server. We had originally planned to complete the agent updates within the monthly maintenance windows for each customer. However, we realized within the first 24 hours that some servers, specifically virtual machines, experienced a CPU utilization increase of 10%-15% as the old agent communicated with the new core management system. In no servers did this increase push processor utilization above the best practice threshold we monitor. Still, this increase was unwanted and unnecessary. The first server agents updated were these, which immediately returned the CPU utilization to normal. We made the decision to accelerate all agent updates to have coordinated client-server versions. These agents have all been updated and CPU utilizations observed are all normal. Now, Simpler-Webb has an improved server management infrastructure, hardware and software included. We will be developing additional functionality for this platform to allow us better vision into your managed servers.

I hope my extensive description of our maintenance has been helpful to you. Our goal is to continuously improve our operations while providing quality monitoring and management services. If you have additional questions or suggestions for our managed security, server, backup, network device or desktop operations, please share with me. I welcome your input. Contact Us for more information.

By Doug Crowley, Managed Server and Backup Engineer

CA recently released ARCserve version 12.5. If you are using ARCserve in your domain today and your application version is 11.5 or earlier, you should strongly consider upgrading your backup solution. Version 11.1 has already been placed into end-of-life status. Simpler-Webb has proficiency managing backups and specifically assisting with ARCserve product updates.

Why upgrade?
o You are an existing ARCserve customer on an earlier version (11.x or before). 11.1 is eol, 11.5 is still supported with no eol announced yet.

o Improved de-duplication.Reduce the amount of data from your backup target.

o Improved Reporting. OS, disk, memory, storage status reporting features have been added in addition to many pre-packaged new reports. The new “Dashboard” view gives you a quick concise view of your backup jobs and client status.

o Improved User Interface. Get a quicker and more intuitive graphical representation of your protected infrastructure.
On one screen you can easily view your backup job duration, storage use, target status, network throughput. No cumbersome menus to navigate through in order to get a quick view of your overall backup infrastructure status.

Consider a Simpler-Webb professional evaluation of your backup solution if:

o Managing the current backup process is harder than it should be. Your current backup application does not provide an intuitive user interface or does not provide the functionality you desire.

o Age of existing tapes is driving your decision to purchase new media. Backup tapes have a life cycle and physically degrade over time. Consider replacing aging tapes to ensure data reliability.

o Age of existing tape drive / device is driving your decision to replace the solution. Updating your existing backup hardware can reduce backup windows, data storage requirements, streamline storage systems and reduce backup/recovery costs.

o You are using ntbackup. Manually starting backup jobs leads to a management challenge in terms of archive indexing and retention policies.

o Duration of backup jobs to tape is constraining daily operations. Upgrading to the latest backup technology can reduce disruptions due to lengthy backup jobs, allow for more frequent intra-day backups and reduce your return to service time if a restore event is required.

o Needs for off-site backup solution are now unavoidable.

o Auditors or directors are concerned about location of backup in the event of a disaster

o Your backups are being archived to systems within the same data center or even rack as the source systems

o You're not performing regular restore tests, data protection reviews, or DR/BC plan reviews

For more information on ARCserve upgrades or Simpler-Webb Managed Backup, please contact us or email info@swinc.com.