Exchange DAG 2016 best practise

[offlarjon]

One of our customers need to protect an Exchange DAG with 18 databases spread out on 3 servers. They are all physical, which means that we need to use the Veeam agent for windows (2.0). These servers are currently syncronized every 30 minutes in a DPM job, and we need a similar syncronization Schedule in Veeam. Is this even possible to achieve? Considering the fact that the active/passive databases are placed a bit "irregular" (according to MS best practise) and that I cannot see an option to choose whether to backup the active or the passive databases.

[Dima P.]

Hello Lars,

Disclaimer: VAW does not support Microsoft failover clusters and applications residing failover clusters because it knows nothing about other nodes (we say it’s not cluster aware).

Now, what to expect from VAW when its installed on DAGs node? It can backup your databases and even trigger log truncation when backup is running on an active node. However, you need to ensure that failover won’t happen while backup job is running - otherwise job fails. With server edition, you can trigger the failover or maybe lower the failover sensitivity via pre freeze scripts.

[offlarjon]

Hello Dima,

Thank you for your reply. So the databases need to run on an Active node in order to truncate the logs? I would like to upload an image (from my local drive which shows the current Exchange DB location on the different DAG nodes, but can't find an option to do it here?

Disclaimer: VAW does not support Microsoft failover clusters and applications residing failover clusters because it knows nothing about other nodes (we say it’s not cluster aware). Is there a Veeam whitepaper for this statement? Or perhaps a KB article?

Best regards
Lars