Prerequisites for creating a Business Continuance plan

Before you create a Business Continuance plan for your clustered configuration, or on a stand-alone server, ensure that you have necessary software installed, drive letters or mountpoints available, and correct cluster configuration on the production and the Business Continuance site.

• Exchange, SnapDrive, and SnapManager must be installed.
• The SnapManager service account must have full access privileges.

  See Setting permissions for business continuance on Microsoft Windows 2008R2 for information on how to set permissions for your SnapManager service account.

• Ensure that Business Continuance is supported by your system configuration.
• The drive letters or mountpoints used by Exchange databases, transaction logs, SMTP, MTA, and the Exchange data directory must be available to use in the Business Continuance host.

  In the case of Exchange Server 2003, the Exchange data directory specified during the creation of the Exchange Virtual Server must be in a LUN along with either SMTP or MTA components, or Logs, or SnapManager SnapInfo components.

• You must have created and initialized all SnapMirror relationships between the source volumes and the destination volumes.
• Before creating a Business Continuance plan, ensure that the mailbox database cluster resources are dependent on the disk resources as recommended by Microsoft.

  This step is necessary because the installation of Exchange 2007 does not create a dependency between database resources and disk resources. This can result in some databases not coming online after a Business Continuance failover.

• Before creating a Business Continuance plan, ensure that the mailbox database cluster resources are dependent on the appropriate disk resources as recommended by Microsoft.

  This step is necessary because the installation of Exchange 2007 does not create a dependency between database resources and disk resources. This can result in some databases not coming online after a Business Continuance failover. Also, after a Business Continuance failover, you must recreate the dependencies appropriately between database resources and disk resources.

• If you have a primary Domain Name System (DNS) on the production site, and a secondary or slave DNS running on the Business Continuance site, you must convert the secondary or slave DNS running on the Business Continuance site into a primary DNS.

  This converts the secondary DNS from a read-only server to a write-enabled server, hence preventing the failure of DNS changes during the execution of your Business Continuance plan.

• In a remote recovery scenario, create two separate Windows server clusters, one at the production site and one at the Business Continuance site.
• Ensure that the operating systems installed on both the servers is the same.
• In Microsoft Window 2008 failover clusters, the network name resource has a new private property, HostRecordTTL, which is set to 20 minutes by default. Set the private property HostRecordTTL to 5 minutes as recommended by Microsoft.
• Prior to creating the Business Continuance plan, ensure that the Microsoft Exchange CMS version matches the version of the Exchange binaries in all of the production and DR cluster nodes. This should be ensured when you upgrade your version of Microsoft Exchange.
• If you are using Windows 2008, ensure that the Windows Management Instrumentation traffic is enabled in the firewall.
• If you are using Windows 2008, the Windows Management Instrumentation namespace security must allow SnapManager to access all nodes in the cluster.
• If you are using Windows 2008, the network name specified when you create the Business Continuance plan must match the cluster network name.

  For Windows 2003, the network name must match the network connection name.

• If you are using Microsoft Windows 2008, rename the network name in the Failover Cluster Management to be the same as the network name in the Control Panel, prior to creating the Business Continuance policy.

  The Windows 2008 system uses different Network Names in the Control Panel and Failover Cluster Management module. During the Business Continuance policy creation, the network name in the Failover Cluster Management is used. This will cause the Business Continuance policy execution to fail when executed.

• System configuration for Business Continuance
  Before you create a Business Continuance plan, check that Business Continuance is supported by your system configuration. The site failover type might be mailbox rehoming (database portability) or CMS failover, depending on your system configuration.