Exchange Server Transaction Log Backups?

[rowebil]

Hello,
We have a client who has Exchange Server 2016 installed on Nutanix AHV VM and uses Veeam for Nutanix AHV Proxy for backups.
January and July 2021 we had biannual backups taken. From January 2021, the backup restore for application-items opens up directly to the Exchange Mailbox databases.
July 2021 restore requires that I select the Mailbox database and apply the log files to reconstruct the backup.
This means back in January something was configured to perform application-consistent backups and now whatever it is no longer applies. The backup sees the mailbox database files as in a 'dirty state'.

How do people perform application-consistent snapshots so that transaction logs are truncated and merged into the full mailbox database file during backup?
I know of a way to trick Windows Server going into 'VSS backup mode' which does the truncation but this doesn't seem to be the 100% correct way to do this.

January 2021 backups were running fine... then before July 2021 something changed and caused these files to not truncate.

How is everyone else doing this?

[Mildur]

Hi Williams

I recommend to use Veeam Agent for Windows to backup MSSQL and Exchange Servers. Veeam cannot do Guest Application Aware processing with Nutanix AHV VMs. And without AAP, there is no truncation from veeam.

This is the only way to do it with veeam today.

See here a topic about the same question.

[rowebil]

How did this backup work perfectly fine without the use of Veeam Agent for Windows previously? It is confusing when everyone tells me to use Veeam Agent for Windows when I had not used that previously and hadn't had any issues.

I used Veeam Agent for Windows a while ago for SQL and the Nutanix backup caused some conflict with both running at the same time.

How would I configure both Veeam Agent for Windows and Veeam for Nutanix AHV jobs without conflicting?

[Mildur]

Nutanix VM backups can be consistent, if you follow the guide from nutanix.

But there will be no log truncation.
For sql, you could configure the simple recovery model to have no transaction logs. For exchange, you could configure Circular Logging to have no logs. But I don‘t like neither of this configurations.

How would I configure both Veeam Agent for Windows and Veeam for Nutanix AHV jobs without conflicting?

Don‘t let them run at the same time. Both leverage vss, and vss should only be used by one backup simultaneously. Schedule them in a way, that they never overlap.

In my environment, I would not use vm backups. Now with V11a and Nutanix 6.0, you can use instant recovery to restore your agent backups back to Nutanix with a small RTO.
Or restore an agent backup directly as a vm to Nutanix since V10. No need to create a vm and an agent backup.