Essential Strategies to Prevent Exchange Server Downtime

A major issue which Exchange admins often face is server downtime. There are multiple reasons that can cause downtime, such as power failure, hardware failure, database corruption, etc. Although even after taking all the precautions against known issues, there is still a chance that some unforeseen disaster might happen.

But preparing, monitoring, and managing the Exchange Server can help reduce the chances of a disaster. In this article, we will be discussing some common strategies which can help administrators to prevent or reduce Exchange Server downtime.

Some Essential Strategies to Prevent Exchange Server Downtime

Here, we will be sharing a few simple strategies that you can follow to prevent Exchange Server downtime.

Data and Services Redundancy

With standalone Exchange Server, there are limited possibilities when it comes to redundancy and resilience of the server. For this reason, Microsoft provides the Database Availability Group (DAG) feature, which allows companies to create clusters for both services and data failover.

By setting up two or more servers, you can create an availability group where all the databases will be replicated using transaction logs from the active databases to copy databases. In case the main server is unavailable, the database copies on other servers will automatically become active to ensure business continuity and also the services of Exchange Server will automatically take over for the user, thus preventing downtime.

Apart from local business continuity, if the servers are geographically located, the company would also benefit from disaster recovery on an offsite location.

Backup Strategy

Having a resilient system is good but if all fails, then you would need to have a solid backup solution. You can have a full, incremental, or differential backup of the server depending on the business nature and needs.

When choosing a backup solution, you must ensure that it is compatible and application-aware with the current version of Exchange Server. It also ensures that the backup is healthy and if anything happens, the administrator can granularly restore emails or the full server, if needed.

Apart from having a good backup solution, you should monitor and test the backups. It is highly recommended that backups should be checked on a daily basis with a weekly test restore to ensure the restorability of the backups.

Disaster Recovery Planning

What would happen when a disaster strikes? Who must be informed and what is the procedure to follow? You should have answers to these questions so that you would not be in a panic state. For this reason, it is recommended to create a document and repository that should illustrate the step-by-step process on how to rebuild the server and return to normality. The document should be a cookbook and should include the following:

• Full documentation of the servers.
• Contact people for network, storage, infrastructure, and management.
• Full disaster recovery process.
• List of vendors or suppliers.

The disaster recovery exercise should be executed on a yearly basis to ensure that in case of a disaster, the documentation, media, and people are in sync. If during the exercise, you encounter any issue, the document should be updated to reflect the changes and fixes.

This exercise will ensure that if anything happens, you would have the step-by-step guide on the tasks to be taken and right tools in hand to minimize the impact and reduce complexity of the task, thus ensuring a quick recovery.

Implement Monitoring System

There are small issues that if not tackled, could lead to critical situations. For this reason, the Exchange Server, network, and bandwidth should be monitored by a monitoring system. The system would constantly monitor the following:

• Network output.
• Internet bandwidth.
• CPU, RAM, and storage performance.
• Free disk space.

Some monitoring tools also monitor the Windows event logs and actual Exchange Server logs. If any failure or error occurs, the team will be alerted. There are some monitoring tools that are anomaly based, and learn from the server’s activity and understand the anomaly and spikes to see if the spike is a false positive and effectively alert when there is a real spike.

Recovering the Data

Recovering the data is the most tricky and crucial part when a disaster strikes. Recovery of the data can be very difficult when using the native tools, such as EseUtil. This can cause a big administrative burden on the company, lead to long recovery times, and there is no guarantee that the data can be recovered. Restoring from backup would result in long restore time and incur data loss since any changes will be lost from when the backup was taken to when the failure occurred.

So, having the right tools for the Exchange recovery, such as Stellar Repair for Exchange, is essential for a successful data recovery. This particular tool can open any Exchange Server database/s version with or without a running Exchange Server and in any state. After a quick or deep scan, you will be presented with the entire structure of the database where you can browse/search through the resources with inline search and HTML view.

You can then granularly export user mailboxes, user archives, shared mailboxes, disabled mailboxes, public folders, and deleted/purged items to PST and other formats. You can also export the data to a live Exchange Server database or Microsoft 365 tenant, with automatic mailbox matching, priority export, and parallel export. This tool facilitates a smooth and seamless recovery, with minimal downtime and complete data integrity.

Conclusion

Above, we have discussed a number of strategies to reduce the downtime as much as possible from known disasters. But we cannot predict the unforeseen. For this reason, we need to be prepared for any occasion. Rebuilding the server is easily possible using the recoverserver option as most of the configuration is in the Active Directory Schema but the recovery of data with minimal disruption and data loss is only possible with a specialized Exchange recovery software.