Options for Exchange Application Item Restore

[kmiller1398]

All,

This is my fist post here, and I wanted to say how helpful a lot of these posts are from reading them. I am hoping that members here can let me know how they handle similar situations for restoring Application items in Exchange. We will soon be migrating from Exchange 2010 to 2016. We will have a DAG setup. We typically back up one of the passive DAG members with Veeam 9.5 3A. We use Nimble storage in an iSCSI setup with Dell FX2 FC630 hosts running VMWare 6.5. The passive Exchange server will be running Windows 2016 Standard server with Exchange 2016 Enterprise. The VMX file will reside on a primary VMDK file with attached VMDK files representing Exchange database and logs volumes. I know that Veeam can only do application item restores on volumes where the VMX file is residing. So, I am wondering how others approach restoring application items in their own environments with Veeam given this limitation.

Thanks!

Kevin

[kmiller1398]

I forgot to add that this is for a backup set utilizing restoring Exchange application items from storage based snapshots.

[foggy]

Hi Kevin, do you mean that VMDK disks containing database and logs reside on other datastores? If they are just different VMDK disks residing on the same datastore, you should be able to perform any kind of restores.

[kmiller1398]

Hello,

Thanks for getting back to me. Generally, I create a separate Nimble volume, then create a VMWare virtual disk from that Nimble volume and attach it to the virtual machine. Nimble suggested I just create a large volume as well. It just makes me a bit nervous to create one that large (in this case it would be about 7 TB) for one VM (Exchange 2016). I will need to talk to Nimble about performance issues if we go that route.

[foggy]

In this case yes, you cannot perform application-level restore from storage snapshots for the disks residing on other datastores. But you can restore from regular backup files stored in repository (not storage snapshots) just fine.

[Regnor]

There are no disadvantages if you create a single large datastore as long as you divide your VM in multiple smaller disks.
From a performance point you won't notice much difference within Exchange.

It makes sense to separate multiple VMs on different datastores because of latency and queuing.