How to enable Standby Continuous Replication (SCR)
Standby Continuous Replication is one of the coolest features introduced with Exchange Server 2007 SP1.
Recently I had the chance to use it and I can say it really rocks. In order to enable it, I followed the steps described on Microsoft TechNet, How to Enable Standby Continuous Replication for an Existing Storage Group. Since I was doing it for a Storage Group for which I didn't have all the transaction logs from the creation of that Storage Group, I had also to seed the SCR target.
These are the full steps required for this scenario:
- Make sure that the paths for log files and database file can be identically matched on the SCR source and on the SCR target.
- On the active node, run the following Exchange Management Shell cmdlet:
Enable-StorageGroupCopy -Identity <NameofStorageGroup>
-StandbyMachine <SCRTargetMachine> -ReplayLagTime 0.1:0:0
- Again, on the active node, suspend the replication:
Suspend-StorageGroupCopy -Identity <Server\StorageGroupName>
-StandbyMachine <SCRTargetMachine>
- On the passive node (aka target SCR) run the following command:
Update-StorageGroupCopy -Identity <Server\StorageGroupName>
-StandbyMachine <SCRTargetMachine>
This last step will synchronize the database from the source to the target server. It can take a while, depending on the size of data to be copied. After it finishes, replication to the storage group copy will be automatically resumed.
To check the status of the replication process, you can run the following Exchange Management shell cmdlet:
Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus -Server:<SCRSourceMachine>
-StandbyMachine:<SCRTargetMachine>
