Thursday, January 08, 2015

DAG Witness Server on Microsoft Azure !!!

I recently came across a vital TechNet article published few days back, which speaks over a new enhancement for Exchange Server 2013 Database Availability Groups by making the most awaited feature "Witness Server in Microsoft Azure" now possible. This new enhancement will make Exchange DAGs more robust by building one more layer of high availability and assists the Automatic Data Center fail-over during DR scenarios in a site-resilient Exchange Infrastructure.


Its been quite sometime since I worked with DAG and this feature was the most expected one when Microsoft started this discussion way back and stopped due to service limitation for a while, the same is now getting addressed and this great feature is now made available.

The key to make this work is the new enhancement "Multi-site VPN support" made available to Azure in  June 2014 as updated in the below extract from the article.

Microsoft Azure introduced multi-site VPN support, which enabled organizations to connect multiple datacenters to the same Azure virtual network. This change also made it possible for organizations with two datacenters to leverage Microsoft Azure as a third location to place their DAG witness servers.

Today got a chance to spend sometime on reading this article and thought of writing this post to share this to readers and we can soon expect the official announcement.

More information with detailed walk-through is available in the TechNet article below,

Access here: Using a Microsoft Azure VM as a DAG witness server

Moving Witness to Azure is still a great enhancement for High Availability and Site resilience and I believe Organizations' who utilize Azure as a part of their Infrastructure may start to adopt this soon. As a side note, Deploying Exchange Servers in Azure is not yet supported and this article is applicable only for placing the witness server for DAG.

Update: 

Here comes the official EHLO Blog post announcement on this great feature.

Access here: Using an Azure VM as a DAG Witness Server

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