Although an Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Chat Server allows only one Group Chat Compliance Server be active in a pool at a time, you can install multiple cold-standby Compliance Servers and follow a set of manual disaster recovery steps to fail over the processing of compliance events from one Compliance Server to another. If you are installing multiple Compliance Servers, all Compliance Servers, whether active or standby, should have a Startup Typevalue of Manualin Services in Control Panel. This is important because the group chat pool cannot tolerate more than one active Compliance Server, and a service should not start if it is not currently configured as the active service.

You can identify the active Compliance Server in the Group Chat database using the value of the serverTypecolumn in the tbServerIdentitytable. If the Compliance Server, identified by its FQDN in the serverAddresscolumn, has an associated value of 4 in the serverTypecolumn, it is the active server.

The procedures in this section describe how to install a backup Compliance Server, how to switch to a backup Compliance Server following an outage, and how to revert to the original Compliance Server. To perform the steps in the procedures, you must have read/write access to both the Group Chat database and the compliance database.

Installing a standby Compliance Server

You can install as many standby Compliance Servers as your business requires. Use the following steps to install a standby Compliance Server:

  1. Disable the primary (active) Compliance Server using the steps detailed in Disabling the Active Compliance Server.

  2. Install a standby Compliance Server using the same installation options that were selected for the primary.

    After you perform this step, the standby Compliance Server is the active server.

  3. Re-enable the primary Compliance Server, following the steps outlined in Changing the Active Compliance Server.

Switching to a standby Compliance Server following an outage

In the event of an outage, it may be necessary to migrate compliance processing to a standby Compliance Server. Use the following steps to make this switch:

  1. Disable the failed Compliance Server following the steps detailed in Disabling the Active Compliance Server, beginning with the cleanup process described in step 4.

    Important:
    Be sure to follow the instructions for creating a backup of the compliance data tables, because you will need that information when you revert to the primary Compliance Server.
  2. Make the standby Compliance Server active, following the steps in Changing the Active Compliance Server.

Reverting to the primary Compliance Server

After recovering from the failure, use the following steps to revert compliance processing back to the primary Compliance Server:

  1. Disable the standby Compliance Server, following the steps in Disabling the Active Compliance Server.

  2. Make the primary Compliance Server active, following the steps in Changing the Active Compliance Server.

    Important:
    Be sure to restore the compliance data tables in the database using the backup file you created before you disabled the original primary Compliance Server.

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