Exchange 2010 Recovery

Recently I had to recover my Exchange 2010 Servers. One of them was the Mailbox server role part of the DAG and the other one was the CAS, Hub and UM server. Those 2 servers were totally gone, unrecoverable due to RAID controller failure

CAS + Hub + UM Server Recovery

• Build the server, Windows 2008 R2 SP1, name it EXACTLY the same name with the failed server name
• Add all the Windows Server role + features required for CAS+Hub+UM
• Patch it
• Join to the domain
• Extract the Exchange 2010 SP2 to the temp directory (e.g. C:\temp)
• Run setup.com /m:RecoverServer
• Reboot and check the configuration

Mailbox Server Recovery

• Build the server, Windows 2008 R2 SP1 (Enterprise), name it EXACTLY the same name with the failed server
• Add the Windows Server role + features required for Mailbox role
• Patch it
• Join to the domain
• Remove the database copy from this failure Mailbox server (e.g. do this from the running Exchange 2010 Server)

Remove-MailboxDatabaseCopy DB1\MBX1

• Remove the failed server's configuration from the DAG

Remove-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer -Identity DAG1 -MailboxServer MBX1 -ConfigurationOnly

• Extract the Exchange 2010 SP2 to the temp directory (e.g. C:\temp)
• Run setup.com /m:RecoverServer
• Reboot
• Add the server back to the DAG

Add-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer -Identity DAG1 -MailboxServer MBX1

• Add the database copy

Add-MailboxDatabaseCopy -Identity DB1 -MailboxServer MBX1