Exchange 2010 journaling, DAG or not to DAG

[FreKac2]

Starting this new thread instead of hijacking another thread.

It's in regard to Exchange 2010 and journaling and the new feature of DAG's.

Do you really want a journal mailbox to be part of DAG ?

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Can't say I've looked very closely at 2010 but since a DAG is some form of replication and log-shipping (AFAIK), wouldn't that increase the amount of data that need to be sent/stored quite a lot. Compared to e.g. a "normal" exchange cluster for the failover capability ? (or the equivalent solution today)

Sure one benefit of EV would be to get rid of stuff in the journal mailbox and thus keeping the extra amount to a minimum, so maybe it doesn't make such a big difference anyway.

Kind of depends on the "Remove Safety Copies" as well I guess.

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Sure EV don't store shortcuts in the journal mailbox/es but the data would still need to be transfered or ?

Also if "After Backup" is used at least in the interim it would be quite a lot of storage (depending on the amount journaled and setup).

Has anyone had any discussions in regard to this, haven't been to a customer yet with 2010 and journaling enabled :)

[JesusWept3]

I don't really know of anyone that would use After Backup for journaling in a busy environment, but in all honesty, when it comes to being compliant (which is the whole reason for buying journaling piece in the first place) is it worth taking the risk?

In all honesty it sounds like something that you'd want to test for yourself as exhaustively as you can, you can listen to peoples thoughts and feelings about what they think or what they may have seen, but all environments are differently and you want to know how it reacts in your environment and such.

[FreKac2]

Yep, if they have to be compliant then there isn't really an option other than "After Backup".

I was asking in regard to thoughts/opinions and if anyone has already done it. As I'm not the end customer (consultant) I end up in all kind of environments :)

[JesusWept3]

Well for compliance you can still do immediately after archiving and track the backup status via the watchfile tables and journalarchive tables, plus in big environments you may be doing snapshots or log shipping or using a compliance device with replication so it no longer becomes an issue.

I would not advise for instance a company that journals 2 million emails a day that requires compliancy to use an After Backup solution, they should use Immediately After Archive and storage such as a centera  with replication.

But regardless being a consultant i would definitely doubly tripply recommend the test, test test and more tests, i can't imagine anything worse than going on site to recommend something that someone said on Connect :)

[FreKac2]

I think you missunderstand what I'm looking for (or my explanation is bad).

There have to be some sort of common criteria for what is a good or bad idea, then there will always be special cases.

E.g. in regard to EV it's recommended to have e.g. a minimum of 4GB of RAM (bad example).

So in regard to a journal mailbox in 2010, is it recommended, doesn't matter, etc. if it's part of a DAG that gets replicated ?

See it as that first discussion with the customer and they ask, We want to use Journaling, do you recommend any perticular setup in regard to archiving ?

[GertjanA]

Just thinking about it, but is it not possible to create a mbx database having only the journal mailbox, and then make this database NOT part of a DAG?

This implies that you will need to create several mbx databases with multiple journalmailboxes, so you can failover manually to another journal mailbox when needed.