Changes to high availability and site resilience over previous versions

Applies to: Exchange Server 2013 SP1

Exchange 2013 uses DAGs and mailbox database copies, along with other features such as single item recovery, retention policies, and lagged database copies, to provide high availability, site resilience, and Exchange native data protection. The high availability platform, Exchange Information Store and Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) is enhanced to provide greater availability and easier management, and to reduce costs. These enhancements include:

• Reduction in IOPS over Exchange 2010: This enables you to leverage larger disks in terms of capacity and IOPS as efficiently as possible.

• Managed availability: With managed availability, internal monitoring and recovery-oriented features are tightly integrated to help prevent failures, proactively restore services, and initiate server failovers automatically or alert administrators to take action. The focus is on monitoring and managing the end-user experience rather than just server and component uptime to help keep the service continuously available.

• Managed Store: The Managed Store is the name of the newly rewritten Information Store processes in Exchange 2013. The new Managed Store is written in C# and tightly integrated with the Microsoft Exchange Replication service (MSExchangeRepl.exe) to provide higher availability through improved resiliency.

• Support for multiple databases per disk: Exchange 2013 includes enhancements that enable you to support multiple databases (mixtures of active and passive copies) on the same disk, thereby leveraging larger disks in terms of capacity and IOPS as efficiently as possible.

• AutoReseed: Automatic reseeding capability enables you to quickly restore database redundancy after disk failure. If a disk fails, the database copy stored on that disk is copied from the active database copy to a spare disk on the same server. If multiple database copies were stored on the failed disk, they can all be automatically reseeded on a spare disk. This enables faster reseeds, as the active databases are likely to be on multiple servers and the data is copied in parallel.

• Automatic recovery from storage failures: This feature continues the innovation introduced in Exchange 2010 to allow the system to recover from failures that affect resiliency or redundancy. In addition to the Exchange 2010 bug check behaviors, Exchange 2013 includes additional recovery behaviors for long I/O times, excessive memory consumption by MSExchangeRepl.exe, and severe cases where the system is in such a bad state that threads can't be scheduled.

• Lagged copy enhancements: Lagged copies can now care for themselves to a certain extent using automatic log play down. Lagged copies will automatically play down log files in various situations, such as page patching and low disk space scenarios. If the system detects that page patching is required for a lagged copy, the logs are automatically replayed into the lagged copy to perform page patching. Lagged copies will also invoke this auto replay feature when a low disk space threshold is reached, and when the lagged copy is detected as the only available copy for a specific period of time. In addition, lagged copies can use Safety Net, making recovery or activation easier.

• Single copy alert enhancements: The single copy alert introduced in Exchange 2010 is no longer a separate scheduled script. It's now integrated into the managed availability components within the system and is a native function within Exchange.

• DAG network auto-configuration: DAG networks can be automatically configured by the system based on configuration settings. In addition to manual configuration options, DAGs can also distinguish between MAPI and replication networks and configure DAG networks automatically.

Reduction in IOPS over Exchange 2010

In Exchange 2010, passive database copies have a low checkpoint depth, which is required for fast failover. In addition, the passive copy performs aggressive pre-reading of data to keep up with a 5-megabyte (MB) checkpoint depth. As a result of using a low checkpoint depth and performing these aggressive pre-read operations, IOPS for a passive database copy were equal to IOPS for an active copy in Exchange 2010.

In Exchange 2013, the system is able to provide fast failover while using a high checkpoint depth on the passive copy (100 MB). Because passive copies have 100-MB checkpoint depth, they're de-tuned to no longer be so aggressive. As a result of increasing the checkpoint depth and de-tuning the aggressive pre-reads, IOPS for a passive copy is about 50 percent of the active copy IOPS in Exchange 2013.

Having a higher checkpoint depth on the passive copy also results in other changes. On failover in Exchange 2010, the database cache is flushed as the database is converted from a passive copy to an active copy. In Exchange 2013, ESE logging was rewritten so that the cache is persisted through the transition from passive to active. Because ESE doesn't need to flush the cache, you get fast failover.

One other change was made to the background database maintenance (BDM) process. BDM now processes around 1-2 MB per second per copy.

As a result of these changes, Exchange 2013 provides a significant reduction in IOPS over Exchange 2010.

Managed Availability

Managed Availability is the integration of built-in, active monitoring and the Exchange 2013 high availability platform. With Managed Availability, the system can make a determination on when to fail over a database based on service health. Managed Availability is an internal infrastructure that's deployed on the Client Access and Mailbox server roles in Exchange 2013. Managed Availability includes three main asynchronous components that are constantly doing work. The first component is the probe engine, which is responsible for taking measurements on the server and collecting data. The results of those measurements flow into the second component, the monitor. The monitor contains all of the business logic used by the system based on what is considered healthy on the data collected. Similar to a pattern recognition engine, the monitor looks for the various different patterns on all the collected measurements, and then it decides whether something is considered healthy. Finally, there's the responder engine, which is responsible for recovery actions. When something is unhealthy, the first action is to attempt to recover that component. This could include multi-stage recovery actions; for example, the first attempt may be to restart the application pool, the second may be to restart the service, the third attempt may be to restart the server, and the subsequent attempt may be to take the server offline so that it no longer accepts traffic. If the recovery actions are unsuccessful, the system escalates the issue to a human through event log notifications.

Managed availability is implemented in the form of two services:

• Exchange Health Manager Service (MSExchangeHMHost.exe): This is a controller process that's used to manage worker processes. It's used to build, execute, and start and stop the worker process as needed. It's also used to recover the worker process in case that process crashes, to prevent the worker process from being a single point of failure.

• Exchange Health Manager Worker process (MSExchangeHMWorker.exe): This is the worker process that's responsible for performing the runtime tasks.

Managed availability uses persistent storage to perform its functions:

• XML configuration files are used to initialize the work item definitions during startup of the worker process.

• The registry is used to store runtime data, such as bookmarks.

• The crimson channel event log infrastructure is used to store the work item results.

For more information about managed availability, see Managed Availability.

Managed Store

All previous versions of Exchange Server, from Exchange Server 4.0 to Exchange Server 2010, have supported running a single instance of the Information Store process (Store.exe) on the Mailbox server role. This single Store instance hosts all databases on the server: active, passive, lagged, and recovery. In the previous Exchange architectures, there's little, if any, isolation between the different databases hosted on a Mailbox server. An issue with a single mailbox database has the potential to negatively affect all other databases, and crashes resulting from a mailbox corruption can affect service for all users whose databases are hosted on that server.

Another challenge with a single Store instance in previous versions of Exchange is that the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) scales well to 8-12 processor cores, but beyond that, cross-processor communication and cache synchronization issues lead to negative scale. Given today's larger servers, with 16+ core systems available, this would impose the administrative challenge of managing the affinity of 8-12 cores for ESE and using the other cores for non-Store processes (for example, Assistants, Search Foundation, Managed Availability, etc.). Moreover, the previous architecture restricted scale-up for the Store process.

The Store.exe process has evolved considerably throughout the years as Exchange Server itself evolved, but as a single process, ultimately its scalability is limited, and it represents a single point of failure. Because of these limits, Store.exe is gone in Exchange 2013 and replaced by the Managed Store.

For more information, see Managed Store.

Multiple databases per volume

Although the storage improvements in Exchange 2013 are designed primarily for just a bunch of disks (JBOD) configurations, they're available for use by all supported storage configurations. One such feature is the ability to host multiple databases on the same volume. This feature is about Exchange optimizing for large disks. These optimizations result in a much more efficient use of large disks in terms of capacity, IOPS, and reseed times, and they're meant to address the challenges associated with running in a JBOD storage configuration:

• Database sizes must be manageable.

• Reseed operations must be fast and reliable.

• Although storage capacity is increasing, IOPS aren't.

• Disks hosting passive database copies are underutilized in terms of IOPS.

• Lagged copies have asymmetric storage requirements.

• Limited agility exists to recover from low disk space conditions.

The trend of increasing storage capacity is continuing, with 8-terabyte drives expected to be available soon. When using 8-terabyte drives in conjunction with the Exchange maximum database size best practices guidelines (2 terabytes), you would waste more than 5 terabytes of disk space. One solution would be to grow the databases larger, but that inhibits manageability because it introduces long reseed times, including in some cases, operationally unmanageable reseed times, and the reliability of copying that amount of data over the network is compromised.

In addition, in the Exchange 2010 model, the disk storing a passive copy is underutilized in terms of IOPS. In the case of a lagged passive copy, not only is the disk underutilized in terms of IOPS, but it's also asymmetric in terms of its size, relative to the disks used to store the active and non-lagged passive copies.

Continuing a long-standing practice, Exchange 2013 is optimized so that it can use large disks (8 terabytes) in a JBOD configuration more efficiently. In Exchange 2013, with multiple databases per disk, you can have the same size disks storing multiple database copies, including lagged copies. The goal is to drive the distribution of users across the number of volumes that exist, providing you with a symmetric design where during normal operations each DAG member hosts a combination of active, passive, and optional lagged copies on the same volumes.

An example of a configuration that uses multiple databases per volume is illustrated below.

The above configuration provides a symmetrical design. All four servers have the same four databases all hosted on a single disk per server. The key is that the number of copies of each database that you have should be equal to the number of database copies per disk. In the above example, there are four copies of each database: one active copy, two passive copies, and one lagged copy. Because there are four copies of each database, the proper configuration is one that has four copies per volume. In addition, activation preference is configured so that it's balanced across the DAG and across each server. For example, the active copy has an activation preference value of 1, the first passive copy has an activation preference value of 2, the second passive copy has an activation preference value of 3, and the lagged copy will have an activation preference value of 4.

In addition to having a better distribution of users across the existing volumes, another benefit of using multiple databases per disk is that it reduces the amount of time to restore data protection in the event of a failure that necessitates a reseed (for example, disk failure).

As a database gets bigger, reseeding the database takes longer. For example, a 2-terabyte database could take 23 hours to reseed, whereas an 8-terabyte database could take as long as 93 hours (almost four days). Both seeds would occur at about 20 MB per second. This generally means that a very large database can't be seeded within an operationally reasonable amount of time.

In the case of a single database copy per disk scenario, the seeding operation is effectively source-bound, because it's always seeding the disk from a single source. By dividing the volume into multiple database copies, and by having the active copy of the passive databases on a specified volume stored on separate DAG members. The system is no longer source bound in the context of reseeding the disk. When a failed disk is replaced, it can be reseeded from multiple sources. This allows the system to reseed and restore data protection for these databases in a shorter amount of time.

When using multiple databases per volume, we recommend adhering to the following best practices and requirements:

• A single logical disk partition per physical disk must be used. Don't create multiple partitions on the disk. Each database copy and its companion files (such as transaction logs and content index) should be hosted in a unique directory on the single partition.

• The number of database copies configured per volume should be equal to the number of copies of each database. For example, if you have four copies of your databases, you should use four database copies per volume.

• Database copies should have the same neighbors. (For example, they should all share the same disk on each server.)

• Activation preference across the DAG should be balanced, such that each database copy on a specified disk has a unique activation preference value.

AutoReseed

Automatic reseed, or AutoReseed, is a feature that's the replacement for what is normally administrator-driven action in response to a disk failure, database corruption event, or other issue that necessitates a reseed of a database copy. AutoReseed is designed to automatically restore database redundancy after a disk failure by using spare disks that have been provisioned on the system.

For more information, see AutoReseed. For detailed steps to configure AutoReseed, see Configure AutoReseed for a database availability group.

Automatic recovery from storage failures

Automatic recovery from storage failures continues the innovation introduced in Exchange 2010 to allow the system to recover from failures that affect resiliency or redundancy. In addition to the Exchange 2010 bug check behaviors, Exchange 2013 includes additional recovery behaviors for long I/O times, excessive memory consumption by the Microsoft Exchange Replication service (MSExchangeRepl.exe), and severe cases where threads can't be scheduled.

Even in JBOD environments, storage array controllers can have issues, such as crashing or hanging. Exchange 2010 included hung I/O detection and recovery features that provided enhanced resilience. These features are listed in the following table.

Exchange 2013 enhances server and storage resilience by including new behaviors for other serious conditions. These conditions and behaviors are described in the following table.

Lagged copy enhancements

Lagged copy enhancements include integration with Safety Net and automatic play down of log files in certain scenarios. Safety Net is a feature of transport that replaces the Exchange 2010 feature known as transport dumpster. Safety Net is similar to transport dumpster, in that it's a delivery queue that's associated with the Transport service on a Mailbox server. This queue stores copies of messages that were successfully delivered to the active mailbox database on the Mailbox server. Each active mailbox database on the Mailbox server has its own queue that stores copies of the delivered messages. You can specify how long Safety Net stores copies of the successfully delivered messages before they expire and are automatically deleted.

Safety Net takes some responsibility from shadow redundancy in DAG environments. In DAG environments, shadow redundancy doesn't need to keep another copy of the delivered message in a shadow queue while it waits for the delivered message to replicate to the passive copies of mailbox databases on the other Mailbox servers in the DAG. The copy of the delivered message is already stored in Safety Net, so shadow redundancy can redeliver the message from Safety Net if necessary.

With the introduction of Safety Net, activating a lagged database copy becomes easier. For example, consider a lagged copy that has a 2-day replay lag. In that case, you would configure Safety Net for a period of 2 days. If you encounter a situation in which you need to use your lagged copy, you can suspend replication to it, and copy it twice (to preserve the lagged nature of the database and to create an extra copy in case you need it). Then, take a copy and discard all the log files, except for those in the required range. Mount the copy, which triggers an automatic request to Safety Net to redeliver the last two days of mail. With Safety Net, you don't need to hunt for where the point of corruption was introduced. You get the last two days mail, minus the data ordinarily lost on a lossy failover.

Lagged copies can now care for themselves by invoking automatic log replay to play down the log files in certain scenarios:

• When a low disk space threshold is reached

• When the lagged copy has physical corruption and needs to be page patched

• When there are fewer than three available healthy copies (active or passive only; lagged database copies aren't counted) for more than 24 hours

In Exchange 2010, page patching wasn't available for lagged copies. In Exchange 2013, page patching is available for lagged copies through this automatic play down feature. If the system detects that page patching is required for a lagged copy, the logs are automatically replayed into the lagged copy to perform page patching. Lagged copies also invoke this auto replay feature when a low disk space threshold is reached, and when the lagged copy is detected as the only available copy for a specific period of time.

Lagged copy play down behavior is disabled by default, and can be enabled by running the following command.

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup <DAGName> -ReplayLagManagerEnabled $true

After being enabled, play down occurs when there are fewer than three copies. You can change the default value of 3, by modifying the following DWORD registry value.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v15\Replay\Parameters\ReplayLagManagerNumAvailableCopies

To enable play down for low disk space thresholds, you must configure the following registry entry.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v15\Replay\Parameters\ReplayLagLowSpacePlaydownThresholdInMB

After configuring either of these registry settings, restart the Microsoft Exchange DAG Management service for the changes to take effect.

As an example, consider an environment where a given database has 4 copies (3 highly available copies and 1 lagged copy), and the default setting is used for ReplayLagManagerNumAvailableCopies. If a non-lagged copy is out-of-service for any reason (for example, it is suspended, etc.) then the lagged copy will automatically play down its log files in 24 hours.

Single copy alert enhancements

Ensuring that your servers are operating reliably and that your mailbox database copies are healthy are primary objectives of daily Exchange 2013 messaging operations. You must actively monitor the hardware, the Windows operating system, and the Exchange services. But when running in an Exchange 2013 mailbox resiliency environment, it's important that you monitor the health and status of the DAG and your mailbox database copies. It's especially vital to perform data redundancy risk management and monitor for periods in which a replicated database is down to just a single copy. This is critical in environments that don't use Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) and instead deploy JBOD configurations. In a RAID environment, a single disk failure doesn't affect an active mailbox database copy. However, in a JBOD environment, a single disk failure triggers a database failover.

In Exchange 2010, the script CheckDatabaseRedundancy.ps1 was introduced. As its name implies, the purpose of the script was to monitor the redundancy of replicated mailbox databases by validating that there is at least two configured, healthy, and current copies, and to alert an administrator through event log generation when only a single healthy copy of a replicated database exists. In this case, both active and passive copies are counted when determining redundancy.

Single copy conditions include, but aren't limited to:

• Failure of an active copy to replicate to any passive copy.

• Failure of all passive copies, which includes FailedAndSuspended and Failed states in addition to healthy states where the copy is behind in log copying or replay. Note that lagged copies aren't considered behind if they're within ten minutes in replaying their logs to their lag period.

• Failure of the system to accurately know the current log generation of the active copy.

Because it's a top priority for administrators to know when they're down to a single healthy copy of a database, the CheckDatabaseRedundancy.ps1 script has been replaced with integrated, native functionality that's part of managed availability's DataProtection Health Set.

The native functionality still alerts administrators through event log notifications, and to distinguish Exchange 2013 alerts from Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013 uses the following Event IDs:

• Event 4138 (Red Alert)

• Event 4139 (Green Alert)

In Exchange 2013, the native functionality has been enhanced to reduce the level of alert noise that can occur when multiple databases on the same server enter into a single copy condition. In Exchange 2010, single copy alerts were generated on a per-database level. As a result, when there was a server-wide issue that affected multiple databases and multiple database copies, alert storms could occur. Because several failures, such as controller or memory problems, are server-wide, there was a moderately high probability that such an alert storm would occur for each server incident. In Exchange 2013, alerts are now generated on a per-server basis. When an outage affects an entire server and data redundancy becomes at risk for multiple database copies, a single alert per server is now generated.

DAG network auto-configuration

A DAG network is a collection of one or more subnets used for either replication traffic or MAPI traffic. Each DAG contains a maximum of one MAPI network and zero or more replication networks. In Exchange 2010, the initial DAG networks (for example, DAGNetwork01 and DAGNetwork02) were created by the system based on the subnets enumerated by the Cluster service. In environments where multiple networks are used and the interfaces for a specified network (for example, the MAPI network) were on the same subnet, there was little additional configuration that an administrator needed to perform. However, in environments where the interfaces for a specified network were on multiple subnets, the administrator had to perform a task referred to as collapsing DAG networks.

In Exchange 2013, collapsing DAG networks is no longer necessary. Exchange 2013 still uses the same detection mechanisms to distinguish between the MAPI and replication networks, but it now automatically collapses DAG networks as appropriate.

In addition, by default, DAG networks are now automatically managed by the system. To view DAG network properties using the Exchange admin center (EAC), you must configure the DAG for manual network control by modifying the properties of the DAG using EAC, or by using the Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup cmdlet to set the ManualDagNetworkConfiguration parameter to True.

Changes to best copy selection

Best copy selection (BCS) is an internal algorithm process for finding the best copy of an individual database to activate, given a list of potential copies for activation and their health and status. Active Manager selects the best available (and unblocked) copy to become the new active database copy when the existing active database copy fails or when an administrator performs a targetless switchover. In Exchange 2010, the BCS process evaluated several aspects of each database copy to determine the best copy to activate. These included:

• Copy queue length

• Replay queue length

• Database status

• Content index status

In Exchange 2013, Active Manager performs the same BCS checks and phases to determine replication health, but it now also includes the use of a constraint of the decreasing order of health states. As a result of these changes, BCS is now called best copy and server selection (BCSS).

BCSS includes several new health checks that are part of the built-in managed availability monitoring components in Exchange 2013. There are four new additional checks performed by Active Manager (listed in the order in which they're performed):

1. All Healthy: Checks for a server hosting a copy of the affected database that has all monitoring components in a healthy state.

2. Up to Normal Healthy: Checks for a server hosting a copy of the affected database that has all monitoring components with Normal priority in a healthy state.

3. All Better than Source: Checks for a server hosting a copy of the affected database that has monitoring components in a state that's better than the current server hosting the affected copy.

4. Same as Source: Checks for a server hosting a copy of the affected database that has monitoring components in a state that's the same as the current server hosting the affected copy.

If BCSS is invoked as a result of a failover that's triggered by a managed availability monitoring component (for example, via a Failover responder), an additional mandatory constraint is enforced where the target server's component health must be better than the server on which the failover occurred. For example, if a failure of Outlook Web App triggers a managed availability failover via a Failover responder, BCSS must select a server hosting a copy of the affected database on which Outlook Web App is healthy.

DAG Management Service

Cumulative Update 2 (CU2) for the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version of Exchange 2013 contains a new service on Mailbox servers that are members of a DAG. This service is called the Microsoft Exchange DAG Management Service (MSExchangeDAGMgmt). This new service contains internal DAG monitoring functionality that previously executed inside the Microsoft Exchange Replication service (MSExchangeRepl).

DAGs without a cluster administrative access point

All DAGs running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 requires at least one IP address on every subnet included in the MAPI network. The IP address(es) assigned to the DAG are used by the DAG's cluster with the cluster's administrative access point (also known as the cluster network name) to enable name resolution and connectivity to the cluster (or more precisely, connectivity to the cluster member that currently owns the cluster core resource group) using the cluster name. Windows Server 2012 R2 enables you to create a failover cluster without an administrative access point. Windows failover clusters without administrative access points have the following characteristics:

• There's no IP address assigned to the cluster, and therefore no IP Address Resource in the cluster core resource group.

• There's no network name assigned to the cluster, and therefore no Network Name Resource in the cluster core resource group

• The name of the cluster isn't registered in DNS, and it isn't resolvable on the network.

• A cluster name object (CNO) isn't created in Active Directory.

• The Windows failover cluster can't be managed using the Failover Cluster Management tool. It must be managed using Windows PowerShell, and the PowerShell cmdlets must be run against individual cluster members.

When running on Windows Server 2012 R2 or later, Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Exchange 2013 and later enable you to create a DAG without a cluster administrative access point. You can create a DAG without an administrative access point using the Exchange admin center or by using the Shell. For more information, see Creating DAGs and Create a database availability group.