Brush up on Exchange Server 2007 Local Continuous Replication (LCR) administration and management best practices in this quick reference on managing LCR.
The Exchange Product Group developed the Local Continuous Replication
(LCR) technology to provide a native data availability solution that can be used to
recover an Exchange database on an Exchange 2007 standalone server in a matter
of a few minutes.
Since LCR keeps an exact replica of the active copy of the storage group, the
number of Exchange backups needed is also reduced drastically. But it's important
to understand that LCR in no way eliminates traditional backups of the databases
on your Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers; instead, it provides you with the option
of taking weekly instead of daily backups, for example.
As you can understand, LCR is an ideal solution for small or medium-sized
organizations because the functionality allows rapid recovery from database issues
and only requires an extra set of disks for the databases copies. LCR increases the
availability of databases on an Exchange 2007 standalone server in an affordable
way. For small shops that don't have a big fancy server with multiple sets of disks, it
is possible to keep the LCR copy on an external USB disk.
When disaster strikes and the database or log files in the active copy of the storage
group become corrupted and shut down, you have the option of recovering
database availability by switching to the LCR copy (the passive copy of the storage
group).
It's a recommended best practice to periodically verify the integrity of the passive
storage group copy to make sure that neither the database copy nor any of the log
files are corrupted. This is done by running a physical consistency check against
both the database copy as well as the log files using Exchange Server Database
Utilities (Eseutil.exe).
When the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server role is installed, setup adds two LCR-related
performance objects to the Windows 2003 Performance Monitor.
Managing Local Continuous Replication in Exchange Server 2007
Home: Introduction
Part 1: Exchange 2007 Local Continuous Replication overview
Part 2: Enabling Local Continuous Replication on a storage group
Part 3: Viewing the status for a Local Continuous Replication copy
Part 4: Suspending and resuming LCR for an Exchange 2007 storage group
Part 5: Resuming and suspending LCR in Exchange 2007
Part 6: Manually adding an Exchange 2007 database to a storage group copy
Part 7: Use Exchange Eseutil for a passive storage group copy integrity check
Part 8: Disabling LCR on an Exchange 2007 storage group
Part 9: Adding Local Continuous Replication performance objects and counters
Part 10: Exchange 2007 LCR administration summarized
