Monitoring Clustered Mailbox Servers and Log Shipping

Applies To: Exchange Server, Operations Manager 2007 R2

Exchange Server 2007 supports several methods for clustering Mailbox servers and providing high availability of databases. This section discusses how the Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack monitors these.

Local Continuous Replication

Local continuous replication (LCR) is a single-server solution that uses built-in technology to create and maintain a copy of a storage group on a second set of disks that are connected to the same server as the production storage group. LCR provides asynchronous log shipping, log replay, and a quick manual switch to a copy of the data.

In this scenario, the Exchange 2007 Management Pack will discover an instance of the log shipping component on the Mailbox server and will monitor log shipping health, in addition to the regular Mailbox server monitoring.

Cluster Continuous Replication

Cluster continuous replication (CCR) combines the replication and replay features in Exchange 2007 with failover features in Cluster service. CCR is a solution that can be deployed with no single point of failure in a single datacenter or between two datacenters. CCR provides several advantages over clustering in previous versions of Exchange Server and single copy clusters in Exchange 2007. This is an active-passive solution that uses the Cluster service but also replicates databases, so database storage is not shared between the nodes.

In this scenario, the Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack will discover the clustered Mailbox server as a type CCR cluster. It will also discover the physical nodes of the cluster as type CCR Node (because the CCR Nodes are responsible for some monitoring in the CCR scenario, like Active Directory Access). The appropriate log shipping components will be discovered and monitored.

Single Copy Clusters

Single copy clusters (SCC), known as shared storage clusters in previous versions of Exchange Server, are present in Exchange 2007, with some significant changes and improvements. This is an active-passive cluster configuration with shared disks.

In this scenario, the Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack will discover the clustered Mailbox server as type SCCCluster. The physical nodes of the cluster will not be discovered, because the clustered Mailbox server handles all monitoring. Although the SCC cluster physical nodes are not monitored as part of Exchange 2007, the physical node computers are added to the Exchange Server Computer Group. This allows overrides for the Exchange 2007 servers to be applied to the physical nodes--which is critical for overriding the agent behavior.

Standby Continuous Replication

Standby continuous replication (SCR) is a new feature introduced in Exchange 2007 SP1. As its name implies, SCR is designed for scenarios that use or enable the use of standby recovery servers. SCR extends the existing continuous replication features and enables new data availability scenarios for Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers. SCR uses the same log shipping and replay technology used by LCR and CCR to provide added deployment options and configurations. SCR can be used to replicate data from stand-alone Mailbox servers and clustered Mailbox servers.

In this scenario, the Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack will discover both source and destination Mailbox servers of the appropriate type. In addition, log shipping components will be discovered on the source (sending) and receiver Mailbox server.