How to seed SCR copy offline for large DB size

A recent question has been raised by a lot of consultants and customer, how we seed an SCR target over the WAN, with a huge DB size “whatever the size is”, the clear question is doing offline seeding by taking the DB offline, copy the EDB file to the remote location and mount the DBm, but this poses a new challenge by talking the DB offline during the seeding process which might take ages and ages.

 

The answer is simple, you don’t have to keep the DB offline, in fact you don’t have to keep the DB offline at all if you use the TargetPath parameter with Update-StorageGroupCopy, you don’t need to take the source offline at all).  See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998853(EXCHG.80).aspx for details on Targetpath.

 

In general this is how to do it,copy the edb file locally either manually or using the targetpath switch “you don’t need to take the DB offline if you used the switch”, mount the DB, move the edb to the remote location, start the replication and seeding should start.