Chapter 11 - Designing a Disaster Recovery Plan for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server

Chapter 11

About This Chapter

Properly designed server hardware can greatly reduce the risk of critical system states. However, a certain level of risk always remains, which careful organizations address with ongoing system monitoring. A wide variety of monitoring tools are available, including standard Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server utilities, as well as professional network management solutions from Microsoft and other vendors. You can even develop your own Web-based management solutions based on Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Collaboration Data Objects for Exchange Management (CDOEXM), Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI), and other technologies. All of these tools can be very helpful in detecting critical system states as early as possible to prevent worst-case scenarios. However, according to Murphy’s law, what can go wrong will go wrong, and it always seems to happen at the least appropriate moment. The communications infrastructure of your enterprise requires a reliable disaster recovery plan.

There is a good chance that a disaster recovery plan already exists in your organization for Windows 2000 Server or other systems. If so, read this documentation to obtain a quick overview of existing backup and recovery hardware, backup schedules, tape rotation strategies, and the operators with backup responsibilities. Among other things, you may want to ask these operators how backup media are verified and whether the recovery procedures have ever been tested. Surprisingly, many organizations blindly trust their backup solutions and never test their recovery plans. Would you trust a pilot who never practiced emergency situations in a flight simulator? Feel free to address any shortcomings in the existing disaster recovery documents with your plan for Exchange 2000 Server. It is vital to test the recovery procedures using most recent backups on a monthly or at least quarterly basis in a dedicated test lab that is not part of your production environment.

This chapter covers the development of backup and disaster recovery strategies for Exchange 2000 Server to help your organization recover from critical system states and data loss with minimal system downtime. Lesson 1 explains how to develop a backup plan according to typical requirements of an organization or service level agreements (SLAs). Lesson 2 then describes representative disaster recovery scenarios to illustrate what information you should include in your disaster recovery toolkit. This chapter, however, does not cover the monitoring of server resources. You can find detailed information about system monitoring as well as step-by-step explanations for backup and disaster recovery procedures in the MCSE Training Kit—Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Implementation and Administration.

Before You Begin

To complete the lessons in this chapter, you need to

• Be aware of the technical features and architecture of Exchange 2000 Server, as explained in Chapter 1, "Introduction to Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server"
• Be knowledgeable about the various dependencies of Exchange 2000 Server on the underlying network infrastructure and the Active Directory service, as discussed in Chapter 3, "Assessing the Current Network Environment," and Chapter 5, "Designing a Basic Messaging Infrastructure with Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server"
• Be familiar with the Information Store architecture of Exchange 2000 Server, as illustrated in Chapter 10, "Designing Fault Tolerance and System Resilience for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server"