Heiko Schuler 
2008-06-06
Within Exchange 2007 Local Continuous Replication enables you to store a passive copy of the Exchange Database(s) on a second disk set. In case of failing of the primary disk set you easily can set the passive database copy of the database as active and therefore minimize downtime of Exchange.
Prerequisites:
- A second disk or better RAID Array to store the passive copy of the Exchange database. Do not use a second partition on the same disk set on which the active copy of the Exchange database resides.
- Every storage group within Exchange must only contain one database
To enable Local Continuous Replication the following steps must be configured.
Open the Exchange Management Console. Expand “Server Configuration” and choose “Mailbox”. Mark the storage group for which you want to enable LCR. From the action pane select “Enable Local Continuous Replication”.
On the Introduction screen click Next
Select the path for the LCR system files and replication logs
(should be located on the second disk set)
If the storage group already contains a mailbox database you must also select a path for the passive copy of the database.
Click Enable to active LCR for that storage group
Verify the health status of LCR
To verify the status of your LCR configuration, you can use the following CMDlet:
Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus –Identiy ‘Servername\StorageGroupName’
The output of the CMDlet is shown in the following picture:
Restore Database from LCR Copy
Important: Before you can restore a database, the database must be offline (dismounted). Otherwise the restore process will fail.
To restore a database from a LCR Copy, use the following CMDlet:
Restore-StorageGroupCopy –Identity ‘Servername\StorageGroupName’
The output of the CMDlet ist shown in the following picture:
When the restore was successful performed you can mount the production database again. Also keep in mind that after a successful restore of the production database LCR is no longer configured for that storage group. You have to reconfigure LCR again.