Microsoft didn't say we needed the witness at the colo. The consultant did that we hired to help us with the Exchange migration did.
So you're saying that in a 3-node DAG with 1 being at the colo, if the other two are destroyed the node at the colo will continue to serve mail without a witness server? -----Original Message----- From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:mich...@smithcons.com] Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 5:38 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Activate mailbox database on single node of a DAG It depends. You always need an odd number of voters, except when DAC comes into play. And I don't know why they said you needed a witness at the colo. That is almost never true. If you got case notes, I'd appreciate reading them, if you would forward to me off-list. -----Original Message----- From: Maglinger, Paul [mailto:pmaglin...@scvl.com] Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 4:19 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Activate mailbox database on single node of a DAG Thanks for the reply. I've finally worked through this after opening a case with Microsoft. Without going into a ton of detail, we basically had to go into ADSIedit, break the dag, create a new database, dismount the new database, move the new database, rename the old database to the new database name, mount the database, and then do a get-Mailbox | set-mailbox to move everyone over. Very painful, but in a case of catastrophic disaster it will get us limping along, and that was the objective. Your comment brings up another question though. When we brought this solution in the intention was that 2 nodes of the DAG (the MB servers) would be at corporate and the single CAS/HUB/MB would be at a COLO. We were told that it was necessary that a witness server be located at the COLO for there to be failover if the 2 nodes at corporate were destroyed. So my question is if the CAS/HUB/MB at the COLO never went down and had the witness server, would it failover and continue to serve mail if the other servers fail? Your response implies that the witness server will be ignored if there is a 3 node DAG regardless. -Paul -----Original Message----- From: Knoch, James W [mailto:james.kn...@intergraph.com] Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 2:30 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Activate mailbox database on single node of a DAG You will need to eject a node from the DAG, as a three server cluster is a majority node set and will not use the witness server. James -----Original Message----- From: Maglinger, Paul [mailto:pmaglin...@scvl.com] Sent: Friday, January 11, 2013 2:42 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Activate mailbox database on single node of a DAG We're doing some disaster recovery testing on our Exchange 2010 environment. We have a 3 node DAG consisting of 2 mailbox servers (exch001, exch002) and 1 CAS/HUB/MB server (exch003). The thought was to only recover the CAS/HUB/MB server and as long as the witness server was available we should be fine. We got the server to come up, and all of the Exchange services are running, but I can't activate the mailbox. It complains that it can't see the server that held the active database. I tried activating using the EMC and by using: Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase -Identity "MAILBOXDB" -ActivateOnServer "EXCH003" -MountDialOverride "None" -SkipActiveCopyChecks and end up with Active Manager isn't reachable on server exch001.scvl.com. The Microsoft Exchange Replication service might not be running. Error Error 0x6ba (The RPC server is unavailable) from cli_GetPrimaryActiveManager. + CatagoryInfo : InvalidOperation (HQMBDB:ADObjectId) + [Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase], InvalidOperationException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : + 7862D273.Microsoft.Exchange.Management.SystemConfigurationTasks.MoveAc + tiveMailbox.Database eseutil /g tells me that the database is okay. EMC tells me that the active status is false and the copy status is failed (of course). Is there a way to activate a database on a single server without it looking for the other members of the DAG? -Paul --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist