Mission-Critical Microsoft Exchange 2000: Building Highly Available Messaging and Knowledge Management Systems
Learn important best practices for ensuring high availability of Exchange Server implementations.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Mission-Critical Microsoft Exchange 2000: Building Highly Available Messaging and Knowledge Management Systems
Chapter 5: Exchange 2000 Disaster Recovery Best Practices
Overview
Providing rapid and safe recovery within desired service levels is a key part of building mission-critical Exchange deployments. Microsoft has continued support for previous methods and strategies for performing backup and restore operations but has evolved backup support in Exchange 2000 to support new features such as multiple storage groups and databases on a single Exchange 2000 server. With proper planning and the following recommended best practices, your organization can be prepared in the event of Exchange Server data loss. This data loss can span a wide spectrum from a complete server catastrophe to simply performing an individual message recovery. In this chapter, after having laid the technology foundation in the previous chapter, I will discuss some recommended best practices for successfully implementing disaster recovery for your Exchange deployment. Of course, these best practices must be tempered and tailored to your organization's specific needs. In addition, while many of the best practices developed for previous versions of Exchange Server still apply to Exchange 2000, many will be enhanced over time. Finally, since Exchange 2000 is a relatively new product and thus not widely deployed, many best practices for Exchange 2000 are yet to be developed and realized. With that said, the suggestions and tips I outline here will give any Exchange system manager a jump start in developing practices and procedures that will help ensure your Exchange deployment is both highly available and recoverable. For detailed recovery procedures, see Appendix A.
5.1 Best Practice #1: Understand Exchange Technology
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