Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out

Breaking the link between database and server

Even though it was flawed in places, the introduction of continuous replication in Exchange 2007 was a big step forward to achieving in-product high availability. The final piece in the jigsaw came with removing the historical tight connection between server and mailbox database. If you look at the configuration data for Exchange 2007 in Active Directory directory service, you see a structure of Organization–Administrative Groups–Servers–Databases. In other words, databases are a child of servers and each database is owned by a server. The situation is completely different in Exchange 2010, where the structure is Organization–Database Availability Groups/Servers/Databases. Now DAGs, servers, and databases ...