Today let’s discuss moving the Active Database Copy to another Database.

 

Moving the Database comes into picture when it’s Planned Outage or Maintenance. Best practice to manually move any active database copies to another DAG member in the DAG.

 

Example:

1.  Failover – Event is unplanned, such as a failure of the server hosting the active copy.
2.  Switchover – this is a task where an administrator will be driven, such as during server maintenance

 

This steps or task can be performed in two ways like:

 

Moving the copies using EMC (Exchange Management Console)

Moving the copies using EMS (Exchange Management Shell)

 

Now we’ll see moving the copies using EMC (Exchange Management Console).

 

Select the Database right click and click “Move Active Mailbox Database”

 

 

Post clicking the Move Active Mailbox Database it will take you to New window to select “hosting server” where you are planning to move.

 

 

Click Browse and select the server where you are planning to host the Database copy.

 

 

Here in my scenario the Database is in EX01 so I’m moving the Database to EX02.

 

Now we need to plan for option “Override automatic database mount dial” setting on the target mailbox server.

 

Before choosing the mount dial type let’s see the type and explanation as shown below:

 

Lossless:  (when selecting Lossless the database will not mount automatically until all logs generated on the active database copy has been copied to the passive database copy)

 

Good Availability: (when selecting Good Availability, the database will mount automatically as long as you have a copy queue length less than or equal to 6. If the copy queue holds more than 6 log files, the database will not mount)

 

Best Effort: (with Best Effort the database will mount no matter the copy queue length. Be careful with this setting as you could lose a lot of mailbox data!)

 

Best Availability: (with Best Availability the database will mount automatically as long as the copy queue length is less than or equal to 12. If the copy queue length is more than 12, the database will not be able to mount)

 

Unless there’s a specific reason to choose another database mount dial override than the setting currently configured, leave this option at None.

When you are ready to activate the database copy in the target mailbox server specified, click Move.

 

So based on the above explanation, you need to plan accordingly.

Here according to my scenario I’ve selected “Good Availability“.

 

 

Click on Move.

 

 

Click Finish.

Now the Database is in EX02 let’s see moving the Database back to EX01.

 

Now we’ll see using EMS moving the Database to another Server.

 

Command:

 

Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase EX01-DB02 -ActivateOnServer EX01 -MountDialOverride:GoodAvailability

 

 

It will prompt for warning if you want to move Database to another server then to you need to select “A” -> Enter.

 

 

Below is the output which shows warning with the move status.

 

 

To identify the Database in which state of mount dial please find the below the command:

 

Get-Mailboxserver | FL Name,AutoDatabaseMountDial

 

 

For More Info:

Active a Mailbox Database Copy

Switchover and Failover

 

Stay tuned for the procedure of Moving the Databases in Exchange Server 2013 🙂

 

 

Praveen Kumar

MCTS, MCITP | Exchange Server

Publisher @ Techrid.com