Virtualization Delivers Exchange Disaster Recovery

Our company recently performed a business continuity drill at our offsite disaster recovery location. Our goal was to simulate losing our entire building (and all our servers) to a disaster, yet restore our business functions within 72 hours. Months of planning went into the successful drill. Although we encountered and overcame many problems and challenges in testing our plan, one of the biggest nasty surprises happened when we tried to restore our Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) active/passive cluster—and no cluster hardware was available. With a bit of quick thinking, I managed to solve that problem by setting up the cluster in a virtualized environment and restoring the Exchange data.

Failed Restore Attempts
As our company's Windows and Exchange administrator, it was my job to document the restore process for each server. I've restored standalone Exchange servers many times by using the Setup command with the /disasterrecovery switch, so I figured that restoring our Exchange cluster would be a snap. How wrong I was. . . .