I’ve been playing around writing some simple PowerShell scripts today so I thought I would fix the reporting problem Microsoft haven’t.

I’ve written a simple PS script that gets the Status(Health), Replay Queue Length, Last Replayed Time and Last Full Backup Time and emails it to a specified address in a HTML table. Just use Task Scheduler to run this daily and you will receive the status of your SCR clusters.

You can download the script here EmailStorageGroupCopyStatusReport.ps1

Or view the script below:

#Replace the PRIMARYSERVER attribute with your production mail server, and the SECONDARYSERVER with your SCR replica
$MessageBody = Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus -Server PRIMARYSERVER -StandbyMachine SECONDARYSERVER | Select @{Expression={$_.StorageGroupName};Name=”Storage Group”}, @{Expression={$_.SummaryCopyStatus};Name=”Status”}, @{Expression={$_.ReplayQueueLength};Name=”Replay Que Length”}, @{Expression={$_.LastReplayedLogTime};Name=”Last Replayed Time”}, @{Expression={$_.LatestFullBackupTime};Name=”Last Full Backup”} | ConvertTo-Html

#Enter your mail server details
$FromAddress = “FromAddress@YourDomain.com”
$ToAddress = “ToAddress@YourDomain.com”
$MessageSubject = “Exch07 SCR Status”
$SendingServer = “MAILSERVER”
$SMTPMessage = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage $FromAddress, $ToAddress, $MessageSubject, $MessageBody
$SMTPMessage.IsBodyHtml = $true
$SMTPClient = New-Object System.Net.Mail.SMTPClient $SendingServer
$SMTPClient.Send($SMTPMessage)
#Written by Matt Shadbolt
#http://www.mattlog.net

Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus – StandbyMachine EXCHANGESERVERNAME

You will then receive the Copy status queues etc. If you receive the following “Suspended” output your replication isn’t working:

There are a couple of commands to restart the replication. Firstly, from the EMS suspend the replication by using:

Suspend-StorageGroupCopy -identity ‘Storage Group Name’ -StandbyMachine EXCHANGESERVERNAME

You will be prompted to confirm – choose Yes. Now restart the replication by using:

Resume-StorageGroupCopy -identity ‘Storage Group Name’ -StandbyMachine EXCHANGESERVERNAME

You should the replay the Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus command and hopefully you should find that the SummaryCopyStatus is now “Healthy”

There are a bunch of new features within Exchange 2007 – Microsoft have really been pushing the new OWA interface – however in my opinion the greatest new feature for administrators with a simple Exchange organization design is Standby Continuous Replication (SCR).

SCR provides High Availability (HA) Exchange services by providing a redundant Exchange database that is used in a disaster scenario. In case of a minor or major disaster – you can easily cut over your users onto the remote Exchange database with very little interruption.
Although SCR seems like a HA clustering technology – it technically is not. There are no passive/active clusters, and there is no automated roll over. The live Exchange information store needs to be manually un-mounted and the SCR server needs to be “started” for the clients to regain connection. Further to that, all the log files that had been streamed to the SCR server need to be “replayed” before the mailboxes are up-to-date.

Although this may seem like an unnecessary manual process – there are good reasons why this is good design. Firstly, as this is not a clustering technology – there is no quorum disk – so your SCR server will not know if the main exchange host is not responding. This means you don’t need advanced clustering design experience – nor the skills to troubleshoot any issues you may have. Also, there is a significant saving on hardware. Secondly, in the case of a soft-failure on your exchange database (ie, a log file commit has caused the DB to become corrupt) – you can specifically choose not to replay those log files on your SCR site – thus eliminating bad data being replicated.
By using SCR in your Exchange organization we can have the benefits of semi-automatic Exchange roll over – without the over complication of having an active/passive cluster to administer.

I will be deploying an Exchange 2007 SCR solution within the coming months and will post my results.