Any Exchange colleagues here in southern Germany?

[knut-weber]

Hello,
we are using Veeam with about 800 virtual servers. And public folders in Exchange 2010. Next we want to migrate our physical Exchange 2010 mailbox servers to virtual Exchange 2016 systems.
6 VMs in one DAG with about 8 TB Storage and 8000 Mailboxes.
We want to use the hot-add mode (no IBM SVC storage integration yet) and take 2 servers with passive copies only (via Reg-key) for backup purposes, while the other 4 servers are active / passive.

We have very positive experience running Veeam for 2 years in production now and had contact to a lot of "sales" persons and technical "specialists" - with i´d like to say "paper-knowledge".
I would like to ask a "real" admin for his best practice from the real world before we implement the whole thing and start migration.
I would like call / skype or short visit in the area Offenburg, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Stuttgart.

kind regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Knut Kristan Weber
Collaboration Solution Center
Burda Digital Systems GmbH
knut.weber@burda.com

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Mr. Weber,

you can contact me (we met some times in the past) or one of the SEs at the region to get a list of other customers using it with Exchange and as well they have the contacts from the service partner that have implemented those.

As well there is my blog post that can be helpful.
http://andyandthevms.com/exchange-dag-v ... plication/

[knut-weber]

Hello Mr. Neufert,
indeed, we have already got some contacts from Veeam.

Refering to your blog post:
"ese.dll can load (by the way Veeam uses the dll) “only” 64 databases. database number 65 will not be loaded. But you can unload one or more of the other 64 database and add the others manually."
Is this still valid?

kind regards
Knut Weber

[Andreas Neufert]

Hallo Herr Weber,

yes, I think this is still the case, but I didn´t looked at the latest Exchange updates from Microsoft. Maybe this has changed there.

There are not many customers that have more than 64 databases on a single exchange server. The overhead for VSS processing (consistency) is significant higher for systems with such a high database amount. Customers usually spread those across multiple Servers.

[Andreas Neufert]

but please let me add, that you always can open the Veeam Explorer manually and add only the needed databases manually. That way it much faster.

[knut-weber]

We wanted to spread 72 DBs in total on 6 servers in a way, that each DB has 3 copies in total (active + 2 passive) and the 2 backup servers have 36 passive DBs each (with least activation preference there).

What I can´t tell is how the restore process looks like in a DAG environment.

In our AD, I can use every backup because all the elements are the same on all DCs.

But if i want a single item restore for a specific person.: Do I have to know in which DB the mailbox was at backup time and on which server the DB was backed up? To be able to open the exact backup job? Or is there something like an organization explorer? As we have no Exchange DAG yet in Veeam, I cannot imagine how it looks like in real - and what a typical admin tells about positive / negative workflow aspects in the daily routine.

We want to take use of the experience of others as long as our design is not yet fixed. With backing up from the passive nodes only we can prevent cluster failovers (more safe than the same subnet delay parameters etc. alone). And use a IP-less DAG. And so on. But that´s only paper-knowledge without personal experience.

[Andreas Neufert]

72x3 / 6 = 36 DBs on each server (active and passive mixed). So there is no issue with our Veeam Explorer for Exchange.

You need to find out in which DB the user has his mailbox. This is possible by Exchange Admin tools or AD. In the Exchange Admin tools you see the server as well where the copies are. You start Veeam Explorer for Exchange and select a server which hold and active or passive DB. Then we mount automatically all DBs. From there you can go to your database and the user or use the search tool.