In the case you find yourself with a broken server and no
way of recovering it, the recovery install in Exchange 2007 and 2010 might just
be a way to avoid messing around with system repair or even system state
recoveries. This option actually allows you to remove this kind of backup
strategy all together! Why you might ask, well, simply put, starting from Exchange
2007 all configuration data is stored in the active directory, more
specifically in the configuration partition of the active directory:
CN=ExServerName,CN=Servers,CN=First Administrative
Group,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=ExOrg Name,CN=Microsoft Exchange, CN=Services,
CN=Configuration, DC=DomainName,CN=Com
Let’s have a closer look at this shall we?
- Open
adsiedit.msc
- Right
click and slect “connect to”
- Under
select a well know naming context select the configuration from the dropdown
- Drill
down configuration, services, Microsoft Exchange, the name of your
organisation, administrative groups, Exchange administrative group, servers
- Right
click one of the server objects in this field
- Scroll
down until you see the msExchCurrentServerRoles
In my case the number here is 38. What this number
represents is the sum of which roles have been installed! Each role has its own
value and Exchange knows what kind of roles need to be installed if you perform
a recovery installation. Pretty neat isn’t it?
|
Server
Role
|
msExchangeCurrentServerRoles
value
|
|
Mailbox Server
|
2
|
|
Client Access Server
|
4
|
|
Unified Messaging Server
|
16
|
|
Hub Transport Server
|
32
|
|
Edge Server
|
64
|
So, in case you want to perform a recovery server install
you can do the following:
- Install your base operating system with the same
name as the server you want to install
- Setup any required prerequisites
- Start the Exchange setup as follows:
- Setup
/m:recoverserver
- Wait for setup to complete
- Restore any databases if required.
If you take a minute to scroll through these attributes in
the properties of the server object you see that there are A LOT of
configuration settings stored here! For example there is msexchinstallpath
which contains the installation path for Exchange,
msExchCustomerFeedbackEnabled to see whether or not Exchange will send back
feedback to Microsoft, msExchELCAuditLogPath for the auditing logs and many,
many more!