CCR display leaves a bit to be desired
I recently got a chance to play with Continuous Cluster Replication (CCR) hands-on at the Microsoft Technology Center in my home-town of New York City, and I can honestly say it is a very solid-performing technology for High Availability between two clustered Windows 2003 servers. I have yet to physically see it on Server 2008, but from everything I’ve been reading, it would appear that CCR is even better on that platform. Next week, I’ll be at TechEd with Double-Take Software (booth 809, if you’re heading to the show), and I’ll be spending at least a little time over at Microsoft’s pavilion checking out their new 2008 systems, including the Exchange 2007 integration.
Meanwhile, there was one thing I found lacking in CCR, the information that is available in the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) is very limited, and doesn’t really give you that much detail on what’s going on.
In the EMC, you can clearly see the current status of the CCR replication for each storage group, which is good, but that’s about all you can see. You cannot configure or manage CCR through the EMC, though you can set it up via the Exchange Installation Wizard. Once it is running, you really can’t do much of anything except move the resources from one node to another with the GUI. While I understand Microsoft’s desire to move Exchange Administrators to the EMS platform and use cmdlets for everything, asking us to drop to the shell just to find out how many logs are in queue is a little much.
As for the shell, EMS does give you much more information on what’s going on with any of the three forms of Exchange 2007 replication. However, trying to get the hang of the several PowerShell commands required to find that information is going to take a bit of time, even for the old MS-DOS hands among us.
Please, Microsoft, give us a single, clear, easy to use readout for this vital resource. Just seeing “Healthy” doesn’t really say everything we need to know. It doesn’t show us how many logs are queued up for transmission due to bandwidth issues that are only slowing down the network, not stopping it. It doesn’t tell us what the replay depth is (though EMS can), and it doesn’t give most engineers the “happy, fuzzy feeling” that we really would like to have with Exchange clustering in general, and especially with a relatively new form of it.
I will send off dispatches from TechEd during next week, so keep an eye on the blog!
Meanwhile, there was one thing I found lacking in CCR, the information that is available in the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) is very limited, and doesn’t really give you that much detail on what’s going on.
In the EMC, you can clearly see the current status of the CCR replication for each storage group, which is good, but that’s about all you can see. You cannot configure or manage CCR through the EMC, though you can set it up via the Exchange Installation Wizard. Once it is running, you really can’t do much of anything except move the resources from one node to another with the GUI. While I understand Microsoft’s desire to move Exchange Administrators to the EMS platform and use cmdlets for everything, asking us to drop to the shell just to find out how many logs are in queue is a little much.
As for the shell, EMS does give you much more information on what’s going on with any of the three forms of Exchange 2007 replication. However, trying to get the hang of the several PowerShell commands required to find that information is going to take a bit of time, even for the old MS-DOS hands among us.
Please, Microsoft, give us a single, clear, easy to use readout for this vital resource. Just seeing “Healthy” doesn’t really say everything we need to know. It doesn’t show us how many logs are queued up for transmission due to bandwidth issues that are only slowing down the network, not stopping it. It doesn’t tell us what the replay depth is (though EMS can), and it doesn’t give most engineers the “happy, fuzzy feeling” that we really would like to have with Exchange clustering in general, and especially with a relatively new form of it.
I will send off dispatches from TechEd during next week, so keep an eye on the blog!
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