What is Active Manager in Exchange 2010

What is Active Manager in Exchange 2010

Active manager works part of exchange replication service, basically active manager is a organizer, active manager decides which mailbox database is active and which database is passive in DAG or which mailbox database copy should be mounted and which mailbox database copy acts as healthy copy in DAG. This will be decided depending on the mailbox database activation preference number.

Let us know much more details on this Active manager, there are two roles in Active manager

Such as Primary Activation Manager (PAM) and Standby Activation Manager (SAM).

Both the roles monitors the health of the database from the information store level and from the ESE level however PAM  determines which database is active and which is passive.

SAM concentrates on health of the information store which is running on local server, if SAM detects failure of information store or database, it initiates communication with PAM for the database fail over.

Server that hosts PAM initiates the fail over. You may have a question if PAM server is down?

Or PAM server itself is offline then another server seizes the PAM role in DAG and initiates the fail over.  

PAM hosts in cluster quorum resource server, if cluster quorum server fails then PAM moves to where ever cluster quorum resource moves to another server in DAG  

Q:-Which Exchange server holds the SAM role?
A:-All the DAG members holds the SAM server role, responsible for monitoring the respective server databases from the information store level

Q:-Which Exchange server holds the role of PAM
A:-At any given point of time only one server can hold the PAM role in DAG. the server that contains cluster quorum information that server holds the PAM role.