• Article

Determining Exchange Server 2010 Storage Configuration

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 includes an updated management shell. Based on Windows PowerShell, this management shell provides enhanced command-line and scripting capabilities. All Exchange management tasks are also accessible as managed APIs for backup applications to use to discover the Exchange environment, as well as view and database objects.

Commands Removed from Exchange 2010

Some important features, such as Single Copy Clusters (SCC), Local Continuous Replication (LCR), and storage groups, were removed from Exchange 2010. Because these features are no longer included, the following PowerShell commands were removed from Exchange 2010:

  • *-ClusteredMailboxServer and Get-ClusteredMailboxServerStatus

  • Enable-DatabaseCopy, Restore-LocalDatabaseCopy, and Enable/disable-LocalDatabaseCopy

  • The -HasLocalCopy attribute

  • *-StorageGroupCopy tasks and the Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus commands

Exchange 2010 Storage Configuration Commands

The following are some storage configuration PowerShell commands that your backup and restore application might use to determine Exchange store configuration information:

  • Get-MailboxServer — Lists all the Mailbox servers. The RedundantMachines attribute on the server object is obsolete in Exchange 2010. The ClusteredStorageType attribute on the Mailbox server is also obsolete. In Exchange 2010, all storage is considered “NonShared”.

  • Get-MailboxDatabase and Get-Publicfolderdatabase — Used, with a variety of search scopes, to find current database and transaction log file paths.

  • Set-MailboxDatabase and Set-PublicFolderDatabase — Used to manipulate database properties, such as allowing permission to overwrite.

  • Get-MailboxDatabase with the -Status option — Provides information about whether the database is mounted, the last backup state of the database, and whether any backups are currently in progress. In general, the Get-MailboxDatabase command will return just the configuration information from Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). When the –Status option is provided on the command line, an RPC call is made to the current Database Master to obtain the latest properties, which might be stale or empty in the database’s Active Directory object. The list of servers that have a copy of the databases is in the Servers attribute. The MasterType property indicates whether the entity that is responsible for mounting the database is a DatabaseAvailabilityGroup or a Server. MasterServerOrAvailabilityGroup is the name of the DAG or stand-alone server that is responsible for mounting the database.MountedOnServer is the name of the server that would have the database mounted if the database was mounted.

  • Get-MailboxDatabaseStatus with the SummaryCopyStatus parameter — Used to verify that the target copy of a database is healthy and able to be backed up. The SummaryCopyStatus property should return the value Healthy.