Exchange 2010 SP1: DAG Node Maintenance

If you are performing maintenance on DAG nodes here is the process you want to go through (along with a slight caveat to fix a possible active copy move issue you may run into). In my environment I have three nodes in a cross-site dag.

All the commands below are run in an administrative exchange powershell prompt.

Process for running maintenance on exchange database servers

Run maintenance on <Dag Node 1>

run maintenance on <Dag Node 2>

run maintenance on <Dag Node 3>

When done performing maintenance on one or multiple servers (hopefully one at a time to maintain full database availability for end users!) you can end up with a sub-optimal active database layout, especially if you have a cross-site DAG. To resolve this you have to rebalance the databases based on the priorities set for them upon creation.

Rebalance databases across dag

If you get any errors you may have to re-index the search catalog for the passive database. Rather than hunting down which ones need to be fixed you can just fix them all with the custom script I wrote below (or for only the mail servers with issues). When finished running these commands then try to run the maintenance or rebalance scripts again.

Fix/Rebuild Search Catalogs