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Reasons to love Exchange 2013 High Availability

Reasons to love Exchange 2013 High Availability. Steve Goodman Exchange MVP Senior Consultant at Ciber UK Twitter - @ stevegoodman Email – steve@goodman.net Web – www.stevieg.org . Reasons to love Exchange 2013 HA.

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Reasons to love Exchange 2013 High Availability

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  1. Reasons to love Exchange 2013 High Availability Steve Goodman Exchange MVP Senior Consultant at Ciber UK Twitter - @stevegoodman Email – steve@goodman.net Web – www.stevieg.org

  2. Reasons to love Exchange 2013 HA • This evening we’ll cover a few great features that I think make Exchange 2013 a no brainer • It’s an informal session so feel free to add your point of view and favourite features! • Let’s start with a brief history of Exchange HA…

  3. Evolution of HA in Exchange A very brief history

  4. Evolution of HA in Exchange

  5. Five great new HA features

  6. 1. No CAS session affinity

  7. No CAS session affinity required • Clients can connect to any CAS and remain connected to the same session • Requires the same SSL certificate on each CAS • Builds on the every server is an island principle • Makes load balancing much simpler

  8. No CAS session affinity required

  9. 2. Unbound Namespaces

  10. Unbound Namespaces • Site Resilience typically required lots of names • Unbound allows you to have a single name across multiple sites (i.e. not bound to a site) • Use no affinity round robin to balance across Load Balancer VIPs • Although not essential, Geo DNS can ensure clients stay in-region

  11. Unbound Namespaces

  12. Unbound Namespaces

  13. Unbound Namespaces

  14. Unbound Namespaces

  15. 3. Two and a half sites AKA File Share Witness in a Third Datacentre

  16. Third Datacentre File Share Witness • Even number DAGs use a File Share Witness to maintain quorum • In Exchange 2010 a typical deployment included a primary File Share Witness in the Primary DC, and Alternative FSW in a secondary DC. • As part of Site Resilience procedures, the Alt FSW would be activated manually

  17. Third Datacentre File Share Witness

  18. Third Datacentre File Share Witness • Exchange 2013 allows a third datacentre to be used for the File Share Witness • This must be well connected to both datacentres • In the event of a single DC loss, quorum is not lost • Azure IaaS may be supported in the future

  19. Third-Site File Share Witness

  20. 4. Dynamic Quorum

  21. Dynamic Quorum • Part of the Windows Clustering Stack and introduced in Server 2012 and enabled by default • Effectively allows the DAG to continue operating even after the point it would normally lose quorum, even down to a single node • Helps to withstand planned shutdowns

  22. Dynamic Quorum

  23. Dynamic Quorum

  24. Dynamic Quorum

  25. Dynamic Quorum

  26. 5. Database Auto Reseed

  27. Database Auto Reseed • JBOD has been supported since Exchange 2010 and is a foundation for Exchange Native Protection • The theory is you have enough Database Copies to remove the need for hardware RAID • In Exchange 2010, a failed disk must be partitioned mounted and formatted, then the database must be reseeded manually and progress monitored

  28. Database Auto Reseed • Database Auto Reseed complements technologies including JBOD, multiple databases per volume and loose truncation • The DAG is designed with online spare disks and mount points for both databases and volumes • In the event of a disk failure, the spare disks are automatically brought online and databases reseeded from other copies

  29. Database Auto Reseed

  30. Database Auto Reseed

  31. Database Auto Reseed

  32. Database Auto Reseed

  33. How are these features used in Office 365?

  34. How are these features used in Office 365? • Microsoft run Office 365 in 26 locations, worldwide • Over 125,000 Mailbox Databases, thus.. • Over 80 DAGs • Over 1200 Exchange Servers • Potentially a lot more DAGs and servers • Global scale requires automated recovery from failures and simplicity where possible

  35. How are these features used in Office 365? • Round robin DNS used for no session affinity when accessing outlook.office365.com • An unbound namespace along with geo-DNS used for outlook.office365.com • A third site out of region is used for every Exchange Online DAG • Dynamic Quorum is on by default in Office 365

  36. How are these features used in Office 365? • Dynamic quorum is used by default in Office 365 to help increase availability • Database Auto Reseed was born in the service as it becomes impossible to manually change disks, then perform and monitor reseeds at global scale

  37. Putting it together Yes, you can try this at home!

  38. Putting it together • You can design a super resilient architecture that can service datacentre failures with little to no customer impact • Microsoft’s Preferred Architecture provides the best starting point when thinking about the best way to put this together

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