Question on Veeam Backup / vPower

[KiwiJJ]

Hi,
We had some major Exchange 2007 issues where the Exchange databases became corrupt and so we restored the .EDB files from a Veeam backup and then replayed the logs using ESEUTIL.

The problem was that the Exchange databases from the backup were corrupt as well so we had to go back a while and then replay the logs for a few days.

With Server 2008 R2 you can do Exchange backups using Windows Server Backup that check the consistency of the databases before backup which would let us know the the databases were in a good state before backup.

Is there anything in Veeam that would do this ?

regards,

John

[tsightler]

You can certainly write a custom check script for your SureBackup job that would run eseutil on the databases and only pass if everything came back OK. We used to do exactly this in our environment. We created a "Check Exchange DB" script that would stop the Exchange services on the server in the Virtual Lab and then run a manual check of the DB with "eseutil" and "isinteg".

For Exchange 2010 the "isinteg" command has been replaced by nice powershell cmdlets for checking database integrity, see:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/arc ... 10708.aspx

The cool thing about these new cmdlets is that they can work while the database is mounted. You could either run them against your running Exchange environment to help keep it healthy, or run it in a SureBackup job to check the integrity after a backup, but you might still want to run "eseutil" the check the files at the "database" level, which still requires an offline check.

The main difference between "eseutil" and "isinteg" is that the "eseutil" tool understands the structures of tables and indexes within the database, and can repair things like corrupted pages, etc, but is unaware of inconsistencies in the data that is stored in those tables. The "isinteg" tool actually understands what data the tables hold, and their relationships to other tables, and can repair the actual data to make it consistent again.