Standby Continuous Replication - On Standalone Mailbox Servers - Part 2

In the Part 1 of this article, we discussed about SCR and how to enable it. In this Part 2, we will focus on the second step i.e. Prepare the SCR Target Server.

We can have the target server prepared initially so that in case of a failure, the SCR activation can be done pretty quickly that will save us precious time.

For all the Storage Groups (from the source server) whose copy has been setup on the SCR target server, we will create the Storage Groups on the Target server and create the mailbox database on it. We can keep the path of the log files and the database on any temp location as we will mount this store, dismount it and remove that temp directory.

Steps and Commands:

As in the part 1 of this article, we have enabled the SCR for SG1 on the Source Server. Here we will create the Storage Group SG1Target and mailbox database DBTarget on the Target Server.

1. New-StorageGroup -Server TargetServerName -name SG1Target -LogFolderPath C:\SG1Target -SystemFolderPath C:\SG1Target
2. New-MailboxDatabase -StorageGroup TargetServerName\SG1Target -Name DBTarget -EdbFilePath C:\SG1Target\dbtarget.edb
3. Mount-Database DBTarget
4. Dismount-Database DBTarget
5. Delete everything from C:\SG1Target

Please note that these storage groups that we have set up on the target server are only temporary objects that will be used to carry out the database portability recovery during the SCR Activation Process. We can create them later on also but creating them now will save us the precious time while performing the recovery.