The background workings of a CCR can be quite mysterious but
are, all in all, not that difficult to understand. First of all we need to know
the following things:
·
There are two fundamental elements for the
Exchange store:
The transaction logs and the database
·
Transaction logs are a maximum of 1 MB in size
(in Exchange 2003 this was 5MB)
·
Log files are stored in sequence and in the
following format:
E(number of the storage group)(8 digit hexadecimal number).log
·
The checkpoint file (EDB.chk) stores which log
files have been written to the database
·
Log files are only cleared if a successful full
backup has been performed
There are five (5) subcomponents that make up the ESE and
define the process of moving database in to the database!
Log buffers
When a transaction is first received it is stored in the log
buffer. These log buffers are used to hold the received information in the
servers memory before the data is written to the transaction logs. The
following parameters define a log buffer:
·
Each buffer unit is the size of a disk sector
(512 bytes)
·
JET will perform sanitation so that they are a
minimum of 128 sectors, a maximum of 10,240 sectors and that the largest 63KB
boundary is aligned.
Log writer
Once the log buffers are filled up the data is moved on to
the disk and in to the log files. This committing of the data is performed in a
synchronous fashion and very fast to assure that a system failure would not
cause data loss.
IS Buffers
The IS buffer is the first step to turning the transactions
to actual data. Grouped in 4KB pages allocated from memory by Exchange, they
serve the purpose of caching the database pages before being written to disk.
When the pages are first created they are marked as clean as
there is no data written to them. Once the ESE plays the transactions from the
logs into the empty pages in the memory it changes the status to “dirty”.
Version store
Since ESE writes multiple different transactions to a single
page in the memory the version store is needed to, not only keep track of these
transaction, but also to manage them. It structures the pages that occur as
they occur.
Lazy writer
When the ESE gets to the point the dirty pages need to be
flushed out of the memory it calls the lazy writer to move the pages from the
cache buffers to the disk. As there is a large number of transactions going on
at once it is the job of the lazy writer to prioritize the transactions and
subsequently handle its task without overloading the disk I/O subsystem.
At this point the transactions in the memory have become
static information on the disk and the dirty memory caches are cleaned up and
ready to be used again!
The checkpoint file
There are two notable components of the database checkpoint,
Namely the checkpoint file and the checkpoint depth.
The checkpoint file (edb.chk) is a file maintained by the
database engine for every log file sequence to keep track of the data that has
not yet been written to the database file on the disk. It is a pointer in the
log sequence that indicates where in the log file the information store needs
to start recovery in case of a failure. Without the checkpoint file the
information store would start replay from the beginning of the oldest log file
on the disk and it would have to check every page in every log file to
determine whether it had already been written to the disk.
The checkpoint depth is a threshold which defines when the
ESE begins to aggressively flush dirty pages to the database.
ESE Cache
The ESE cache is an area of memory reserved to the
information store process (running under store.exe) used to store database
pages in memory, reducing read I/Os and
increasing the performance of Exchange.
The EDB file
As the main repository for the mailbox data the fundamental
construct of the edb file is that of a table. Hence the need to run ISINTEG in
case the edb file gets corrupted as only ISINTEG can fix the tables in the EDB
file.
How it comes together
Imagine a client sends a new message. The page that requires
updating is read from the file, placed in the ESE cache whilst the log buffer
gets notified and records the new transaction in the memory of the server.
These changes are recorded by the database engine but not
immediately written to disk. The changes are held in the ESE cache and marked
as dirty bits so signal they have not yet been written to the database
(committed if you would like to call it that). The version store is used to
keep track of the changes, guaranteeing consistency.
As the database pages are changed, the log buffer is
notified to commit the changes and the changes get written to a transaction log
file. Eventually the dirty database pages are flushed to the database files and
the checkpoint is advance.
The CCR functionality
Now that we know how
the transactions get written to the log files we can go further and explain how
the CCR gets to replicating and replaying these changes!
In a CCR we have two nodes, an active and a passive node,
one which pulls transaction files to the other. The active node is where all
the clients with their MAPI sessions will connect to, the passive stands by in
case of the failure of the active node with its own copy of the database and
log files.
The technology behind the CCR is based on an asynchronous
copy, meaning that the passive copy does not get the information from the
transaction log replayed in the database at the same time as the active node.
In fact, the passive node cannot pull the transaction log file over to replay
it unless the active nodes store process has released the log file (aka is done
replaying the log file to the database).
So if we continue on our earlier premise, one the checkpoint
on the active node is advanced the passive node pulls the log files it still
needs to replay over and replays them in to the database.
Source:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/john-savills-windows-faqs/q-how-does-cluster-continuous-replication-ccr-work-in-microsoft-exchange-server-
http://blogs.technet.com/b/mbaher/archive/2008/01/22/who-said-that-transaction-goes-from-logs-to-db.aspx