Quest have again created an interesting product: Availability Manager for Exchange.

It works by having an agent (or MOM) check the status of the server or store. When the server or store is down, mailboxes (empty ones) will be created on another server and mailbox information on the user's account will be updated to point to the new location. A user needs to stop and start Outlook to access the new mailbox. When service is restored, users can connect back to their original mailbox. The data from the temporary mailbox is copied to the original one.

Interesting, especially for users who always need to be able to send and receive mail (dispatchers etc...). It is all a bit more automatic than Microsoft's Dial tone recovery procedure which, essentially, provides the same basic feature.

Product Information

The article on the MS Exchange Blog clearly explains the changes such as the database limits, logical vs. physical size of the databases and so on.

Microsoft's Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA 1.0) is a tool to inspect Exchange database files and log files. Basically, you point the tool to your Exchange server, you select (dismounted) databases and the tool starts to do its work.

Under the hood, the tools inspects the headers of database files and log files and uses that information to present you with a list of possible errors.

Of course, you can also get this information with eseutil.exe (normally in c:\program files\exchsrvr\bin).

To examine the header of a dismounted database, you can use eseutil /mh <path_to_edb_file>. From the header, you can read the shutdown state. During a disaster recovery, it will be in Dirty Shutdown mode. Under that line, you will see the logs that are required during the soft recovery process. From the header, you can also read the database signature, the log signatures and so on. But then you are on your own because you need to be able to interpret the data. That's always tricky!

So basically, ExDRA 1.0 gets the same information as eseutil.exe but automatically makes some conclusions depending on the output. It can certainly help during a disaster recovery because of the "level of stress" that can be involved.  

For an overview of how the tool works and some screenshots: Overview and screenshots

No problem running Exchange 2003 on 64–bit hardware, as long as you are running a 32–bit OS. Of course, Exchange 12 will require 64–bit hardware and a 64–bit OS. No Itanium though, just x64 or EM64T.

This article contains more info: You Had Me At EHLO... : x64 bit hardware will run Exchange 2003 on 32 bit Windows