A manufacturer's on-premises Exchange restored after a failed cumulative update, then made redundant
A manufacturer of about 900 employees with plants in three U.S. states.
- Scale
- ~900 mailboxes, one Exchange server before, a two-site DAG after
- Engagement
- 2 days of emergency recovery, then a 10-week redundancy build
The challenge
A cumulative update failed halfway on the company's only Exchange server and left services unable to start. Mail for plants and suppliers stopped, the last tested backup was months old and the server had no second copy of its databases.
What our team delivered
- Triage of the failed setup from its logs: which services, which Active Directory objects and which databases were affected, before anything was changed
- Recovery of the mailbox databases from the dirty-shutdown state, with the databases copied aside before repair
- Mail routing restored to users and plants through a temporary path while the server was rebuilt, so suppliers' mail was queued, not lost
- A rebuilt server on a supported version with certificates, connectors and the hybrid relationship with Microsoft 365 verified end to end
- A second Exchange server at a second site, a database availability group with a copy of every database, and a file share witness placed in a third location
- A patching calendar: updates staged on a test server first, each update applied one DAG member at a time, and backups and restore tests recorded
Result
Mail was back within the first two days and no mailbox data was lost. The company now loses a server or a site without losing mail access, and updates no longer need an outage window.
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