Exchange 2010 – Stopping the Information Store Service does not failover database copies.

re: Exchange 2010 – Stopping the Information Store Service does not failover database copies.

TIMMCMIC — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:28:53 GMT

@John:

Apologize for my delay in responding - I was offline.

You shouls always desire to move your database copies to the passive node for maintenance like this.

TIMMCMIC

re: Exchange 2010 – Stopping the Information Store Service does not failover database copies.

John — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:40:45 GMT

I need to restart the information service on the mailbox server which is hosting the active copies of our databases in our 2 member DAG. I need to do this after entering the Exchange product license key. Based on your results it looks like it do not need to move the active database copies before restarting the service - is my understanding correct?

re: Exchange 2010 – Stopping the Information Store Service does not failover database copies.

TIMMCMIC — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:17:36 GMT

@Michael Commons:

I too first thought that stopping a DAG node was considered a graceful IS shutdown - it is not.

When the DAG node stops and the cluster service stops, other DAG nodes detect this action and will begin to move database instances to other servers that remain online.

I believe your only optoin would be to issue a dismount-database prior to restarting the machine. This will also set an active manager flag indicating the database was admin dismounted. When the node reboots, the "active" copy will still be arbitrated to another machine, just not arbitrated in a mounted state.

After the member is backup, you'd have to move the instances back and then mount them.

re: Exchange 2010 – Stopping the Information Store Service does not failover database copies.

Michael Commons — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:27:18 GMT

Do you think that if I wanted to restart the Exchange server and first stopped the IS, that the DAG would not fail over with the restart? We know that it will if we just restart the box, which to me seemed like a "graceful" shutdown of the IS. We are trying to come up with the procedure to restart an Exchange server in a DAG and keep the databases from failing over.

re: Exchange 2010 – Stopping the Information Store Service does not failover database copies.

Emmet — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:06:03 GMT

Good post Tim. Just had this happen....NetApp service account stopped the IS and the database didnt fail over to the local copy.