Helsingborg City, located in Skåne County, is one of Sweden’s fastest-growing cities. The city is known for its innovation and sustainability efforts, as well as being a leading municipality in digital transformation. Helsingborg actively engages its citizens and businesses to create a smart and inclusive future.
For more information, visit their official website
Photographer: David Lundin
Suddenly, Helsingborg City was hit by a severe system outage when the disks in their Hyper-V environment unexpectedly crashed. This made the Exchange farm’s disks, crucial for the email system’s operation, inaccessible. As a result, no one within the city’s operations could send or receive emails, a critical part of their daily work.
Helsingborg City contacted us, and we immediately got to work. Our first step was to migrate the most critical mailboxes to Exchange Online to quickly restore the email flow. At the same time, we ensured that essential systems and users had the necessary access to continue their vital tasks.
Around the clock recovery efforts:
In close collaboration with Helsingborg City’s IT team, we began a strategic and intensive reconstruction process. Together, we carefully analyzed the situation to understand what needed to be addressed.
Rebuilding the IT-infrastructure
With a detailed and methodical approach, we started rebuilding the Exchange farm from scratch. This included implementing new servers and a carefully selected backup for a comprehensive recovery. Every step in the process was critical to ensuring the system could return to full functionality.
To ensure data integrity and system functionality, we took several important measures. We performed a thorough recovery and repair of the databases from the crashed disks to preserve data integrity and correct any errors. These repaired databases were then mounted in the new environment and continuously monitored to ensure stable operation.
We restored and optimized the hybrid configuration to guarantee efficient email flow between Exchange Server and Microsoft 365. Using advanced PowerShell scripts and reliable third-party tools, we exported mailboxes from the damaged databases to PST files.
With the help of eDiscovery technology, we extracted emails from Exchange Online and imported them back into the restored mailboxes. This ensured that no important communication was lost during the recovery process.
After successfully restoring the systems, we focused on ensuring future stability and efficiency. We planned a strategic rebuild of one of the Exchange nodes that was on the wrong storage. We also prepared for the migration of active databases to another node before shutting down the current node.
Additionally, we initiated the planning for a comprehensive upgrade from Exchange 2016 to Exchange 2019, including the installation of new servers and databases to create a robust and modern infrastructure.
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