Backing up an exchange 2010 DAG

[smurteira]

I have a question regarding backing up an exchange 2010 DAG with Veeam 8.0 U2. I have two nodes, one is active and one is passive, I know best practices dictate I should backup the passive node as to not impact performance on the active node. What would happen if something were to happen to my dag and there was a failover and my passive node becomes active. Would Veeam be smart enough to know which node is passive and back that one up now or would I have to come in a manually edit the policy?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Sergio,

The second, you will have to manually adjust the backup job.

Thanks!

[smurteira]

Thank you Vitaliy. Can this then be a feature request? Exchange has two types of failover: Host failover and Database failover. Say I have two hosts with three databases, all 3 databases are running active on one host and the other host holds 3 passive databases. If one of my databases fails over to the other host, prior to the job running, and I'm not around to manually change the backup job it will backup the host I had selected and it will backup active and passive databases. I guess my feature request would be to introduce enough logic into Veeam so that we can select we are backing up the DAG with a passive copy of the databases irrespective of the host that it is residing on. If a passive copy is not available then take a backup of the active databases.

[Vitaliy S.]

Well, yes, you can certainly submit this feature request, but I have a couple of clarification questions for you:

1. When you say that Veeam should detect the failover of the DAG group, do you mean we should have some persistent agent that monitors health of the Exchange server?
2. Assuming there is a way to detect this failover, do you want to add new VM to the job and remove the previous one and run the full backup job cycle?

Thanks!

[smurteira]

The feature that we would like is that Veeam should provide the option to select the DAG instead of the host. It should then detect only the passive copies of the databases on that DAG and start backing those up. If the passive copy is not available, only then it should backup the Active copy. This may require a persistent agent on all the host of the DAG. This feature should be added in the Application Aware section of VM backup. This would give us more control on how we perform the backups on a DAG. You currently install a small agent on the SQL VM's when doing an application aware backup to keep track of the transaction logs so maybe the same can be done here to query the state of the databases on the DAG and implement this feature.

[foggy]

Sergio, thanks for the detailed answer, we will discuss this request internally.

[foggy]

Looking into this further, it does not seem to be as transparent as you describe it, if we consider scenarios beyond the basic "I have two nodes, one is active and one is passive" setup. Even if we could detect the nodes and their status, there are more complicated setups, where there's no 100% passive node - the same server can hold both active and passive databases (or databases not in DAG at all).