Exchange server 2013 has a feature called Dial Tone Portability. This function provides a solution for limited business stability for failures that influence a mailbox database. Exchange administrators can have a temporary mailbox which can be used for receiving & sending e-mails while mailbox is being repaired or restored. It is compulsory that the temporary mailbox should be on same server of Exchange 2013 in the organization. The method for using this dial tone portability feature is called dial tone recovery which includes creating a blank database on a mailbox server to be replaced with failed database.
Perform Dial Tone Recovery with three different options:
Perform dial-tone recovery on server that has failed database
Use alternate server for dial tone database recovery
Use an alternate server for creating dial-tone and database and recovery
These above mentioned option follow the same concept:
Create blank database for Dial tone recovery and replace with failed database
Restore the database (if you’re using same server for dial tone recovery then need to restore database to RDB)
Swap the dial tone database with restored database.
Marge the database
Execute Dial Tone Recovery Process on a Particular Server using EMS (Exchange Management Shell)
Make a duplicate copy or backup of the existing database files. It helps later for further recovery task
Create Dial Tone Database
Run following command for creating dial tone database
Now rehome the recovered mailboxes using Set-Mailbox cmdlet
Use Set-Mailbox command to Robin user mailboxes hosted on the database
Mount the Database
Use Mount-Database command which grant the permission to access database and send & receive messages to client computer
Create Recovery Database
Now to create RDB where you can restore the copy of the database & log file including data which you want to recover into Recovery database
Let’s See how to create RDB >> Run this following command which helps to create Recovery database of RDB1 on the mailbox server MBX2
Follow this command for creating Recovery database of RDB2 on the mailbox server MBX1 by using custom path for the database and log folder
Now to check if Recovery database is created or not, run this command which shows the complete configuration details of the Recovery database
The data is copied to the recovery database but before starting the mounting process of restored database you need to copy any log file from the failed database to RDB log folder which helps to played against the restored database.
Now Mount the Recovery database and then need to dismount it using Dismount-database command
Once the recovery database is dismounted, move database along with log file within the RDB folder. This task is done in preparation for swapping the restored database along with dial tone database.
Need to dismount the dial tone database using this following command.
Now transfer the database along with log files from the dial tone database folder into the recovery database folder.
Mount the database after moving the database and log files into the dial tone database from the safe location including the recovered database.
Run this following command which helps to mount the recovery database
Run the Get-Mailbox and New-MailboxRestoreRequest command which helps to export data from recovery database and helps to import data into the recovery database. It will import the entire sent and received messages using the dial tone database into the production database.
Once the entire process is accomplished, you can remove and dismount the recovery database using this following command
Now need to verify that mailbox successfully moved:
Access the mailbox through the MS Office Outlook Web App
Access the mailbox through the Outlook
Summary
In this blog post we learn about dial tone portability feature in Exchange 2013 server when mailbox database doesn’t work successfully and any failure reason occur in the mailbox. At that time this function helps to create temporary mailbox for sending and receiving emails and continue working flow.
For the technical user, above mentioned issues might not be a matter of concern but for the novice user this process is very long and typical to use, if they skip any step then they unable to get the positive result. I have alternative solution to fix this problem that is Exchange recovery software. With this tool you need only offline or corrupted EDB file for mailbox recovery. This application helps to restore mailbox database from EDB to Outlook PST or Live Exchange server EDB file format without any halts.
Robin Thomas is a technical writer. He wrote plenty of articles or blogs regarding Exchange server mailbox corruption problem and share its precise solution on Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook.