Comments on: Recovering a Failed Exchange 2016 Database Availability Group Member

By: George Laidis

George Laidis — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 20:14:41 +0000

Hello Paul,
I have two Servers in a DAG and I want to remove one Server from DAG. For now, every time I shutdown one of the servers I get an HTTP ERROR 500 after I enter my credentials to login into OWA or ECP. Am I going to kill both servers if I remove the one I want from the DAG?

By: Ahmad Malik

Ahmad Malik — Tue, 25 May 2021 08:35:52 +0000

Paul Cunningham,

i have two exchange servers 1 and 2 with one witness server exchange database was active in exchange 1 but right now i lost my exchange 1 and witness server and exchange 2 is not working it says that database is active in exchange 1 so how to switch over my database to exchange 2 while my witness and exchange 2 is down .

By: B-rock

B-rock — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 21:13:33 +0000

You are the shit Paul

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:21:53 +0000

In reply to Robert.

Hey Paul,

I got it figured out. I had to remove all mailbox database copies, and then use Remove-mailboxDatabase to delete the last copy. I was then able to complete my DAG server recovery.

Robert

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 22:42:02 +0000

Hey Paul,

Great Article here. I have this situation:

1) Both DAG members were lost due to a storage loss, bad hard drives caused both VMs to to basically become corrupted and unusable. No backups.
2) DAG Members: EXCH2016MR1 and EXCH2016MR2 – only servers in the environment.

The domain controllers were all on a different set of storage and they are fine. Were trying to do a recovery but are stuck at this point:

1) Server > Exch2016MR1 was hosting the active copy of this database E2016-DB1.

2) I am not able to use the command move-activemailboxdatabasecopy as the server exch2016mr2 was also lost.

3) Since I cant move the active copy of the database from EXCH2016MR1 to any other server (since all servers were lost) I cannot remove the database availability group server from the DAG and so I cannot recover the server.

4) No production data in the databases on this server. So no worries about data loss. as all mailboxes are in the cloud.

The errors I keep getting are “The Replication Services is unavailable on server exch2016mr1” which is to be expected as the server was lost.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Robert

By: Jeffrey Yunker

Jeffrey Yunker — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 09:40:38 +0000

In reply to Jeffrey Yunker.

Hello Paul

Well didn’t get an answer, but got the DAG up and running again. 3 DB’s are copying, however when one DB copy crashes the one DAG member Server ceases to be an operational server, cannot mount DB. get error 3154.
So how to bring the Member server back into operational status, cluster service is running, in fact all services are running.

By: Jeffrey Yunker

Jeffrey Yunker — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 12:39:12 +0000

Hello Paul,

Thanks for the excellent information. We have a real problem. Created a DAG with 2 Servers (Exchange 2019 Build 464.5), with DB copied. Have no idea what happened but the DAG/Quorum was missing and the whole thing crashed. Needed to do something so basically with force uninstalled the Failover Cluster and removed the DB copies. At least one server functions so Email is working. But now would need to recreate the DAG. When we try to start the cluster service get errors 1090, 7024, and 7031. Any suggestions how we can continue?

Appreciate any help,
Thanks,
Jeff

By: Haydar Tekir

Haydar Tekir — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 15:40:11 +0000

Hello Paul,

happy new year first;-) I have two DAG member servers and one Witness server. I backup my DAG exchange Systems with Veeam.

My question is, in case of failure of one exchange, is it correct just to recover the broken Exchange from a healthy Veeam backup and have overwrite the broken exchange in the VMWare Infrastructure?

Rgds

Haydar

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 20:06:31 +0000

When I try to do the recovery install it tells me that I must use the exact version. Not sure where I can get the full install of CU11 for Exchange 2013. I downloaded SP1 as that was what I could find online and it gave me this is error:

Prerequisite Analysis FAILED
Exchange Server version Version 15.0 (Build 1156.6) or later must be used to perform a recovery of this server.
For more information, visit: http://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.DrMinVersionCheck.aspx

I downloaded a fresh ISO from VLSC and I get the same error. I tried downloading CU11 and placing in in the same directory, but it’s just an .msp file so I don’t think that’ll help. Any suggestions?

By: Patrik Menne

Patrik Menne — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 21:20:35 +0000

Hey Paul, thanks for your great articles.
I have a more specific question regarding this restore article.
We’ve had a two node exchange 2016 dag (provided by mbx01 & mbx02), witnes on a seperate fileshare.
Unfortunately the VMWare farm crashed due to a SAN problem.
After recovering the storage we’ve recognized that mbx01 was lost.
Mbx02 was at this moment no able to mount the DBs as it stated that mbx01 is the owner.
So we’ve removed mbx01 from db copies and dag and were able to mount the DBs.
Thus mbx02 runs currently as a single exchange server, but still has mbx01 in its configuration. The mentioned tips of removing the failed host from the cluster fails, as actually the cluster service is set to disabled and also fails to start after set it to manual.
Could we however proceed with the steps that follow the cluster removal step?
Or do we need to manually remove the failed mbx01 with adsi edit from ad etc?

I’d love to have it more comfi as your mentioned steps seem to be like.
Thanks a lillion in advance, Patrik