Physical Exchange Backups - DAG

[doum]

No problem detected on our side.

transaction logs are cleared on both servers

[Dima P.]

Hello Benoit,

Thanks for getting back to us with the confirmation that proposed solution works for you. As I said before I've added all your votes to the feature request and will will discuss it with the team.

[kloppo]

Hi Folks,
I'm will backup a Exchange DAG Cluster with multiple nodes, each DB has 3 copies.
For my understanding I need to backup these DBs 3 times everytime wich will lead into massive data consumption. Is there a way to Backup only one DB copy per DB?
These are all physical servers, is there a way to Dedup the backup data after Backup without a Dedup Appliance?

Thanks

[DGrinev]

Hi Florian and welcome to the Veeam community!

You can protect your exchange DAG with Veeam B&R 9.5U4 but there is no way to backup only one DB.
Please review the discussion above as it contains related information about DAG protection. Thanks!

[kloppo]

Hello Benoit,

Thanks for getting back to us with the confirmation that proposed solution works for you. As I said before I've added all your votes to the feature request and will will discuss it with the team.

+1 vote from my site

How is the Dedup effiiency on VAW backups? I need to backup 4 physical DAG Members, will they be deduped? All will be backuped in one single job.

[Dima P.]

Florian,

Consider your vote being added to this feature request.

How is the Dedup effiiency on VAW backups? I need to backup 4 physical DAG Members, will they be deduped?

Whenever agent is managed by backup server and you use failover cluster job type regular Veeam B&R deduplication engine kicks in (since data for all the nodes is going to be stored within single backup file), so you can expect deduplication ratio similar to vm backup jobs.

P.S. Please keep in mind that workaround to protect single node with all the DB copies instead of entire DAG works perfectly.

[victor.bylin@atea.se]

Hi,

Regarding backup option to only backup the passives for DAG deployments is that feature in v10?

Best regards!
Victor

[Dima P.]

Hello Victor,

Unfortunately this feature wont be included in the upcoming v10 but the suggested workaround remains valid. Thanks!

[victor.bylin@atea.se]

Hi,

Okay that is sad news.

This environment has 4 copies spread over 6 servers and has been built to have active DBS on all servers.
To have DBS active on all servers is best practice from MS.
So the workaround just backing up passives servers doesn't work in this case.
I know 4 copies isn't that normal to have, but anyways to backup only passives is a needed feature in much more cases aswell.

Best regards!
Victor

[Dima P.]

Hi Victor,

I'll add your vote to this feature request, thank you for honest feedback!

[ianbutton1]

I get the feeling that we're flogging a dead horse here - with the market moving towards Office 365 in the cloud, support for backups of physical on-premise Exchange isn't going to be a high priority for Veeam. But at least backup of a passive DAG member does work, and granular restore from that is easy, using Veeam Explorer - probably the best we can hope for in the circumstances.

[samirb]

Hello,

I'm will backup a Exchange DAG Cluster with multiple nodes,we have over 100 dabase to back up and 12 servers. 1To per Database backup for 21 days.
If I need to backup these DBs 3 times everytime wich will lead into massive data consumption. Is there a way to Backup only one DB copy per DB?
These are all physical servers.

best regards

[DGrinev]

Hello Samirb, welcome to the community!

You cannot back up only one DB copy with the current version of the Agent.
I will count your post as a vote for the feature to be implemented.

Thank you!

[mark49808]

Old thread, but i dont see this discussed anywhere else. Did this ever get any fixes in to only backup one DB copy? I dont see anything in v10 or v11 release notes.

[Dima P.]

Hello mark49808,

It's not possible to exclude specific database with the latest version. Can you please describe your setup to better understand the requirements? Thank you!

[doum]

he doesn't ask to exclude a specific datatabase

he asks if veeam still backup all database copy in a DAG, or if it's possible, for example when you backup a DAG with two servers and two copies, that veeam will just backup one copy of the database.

[mark49808]

My request is the issue described in this post. Veeam will back up all copies of a an exchange database instead of only a single passive copy. So with the standard 4 server dag it will back up 4x the data for no reason. The workaround proposed is to have a single server with only passive copies and just back that one server up. Other vendors are more DAG aware and just back up a single copy of passive databases regardless of which server they live on. So there is no need to have a server with only passive copies forced. This has worked better in Netbackup for example for 10 years.

[Dima P.]

Thanks for the details! Yes, we are on the same page: I've been talking about the copy exclusions and I am sorry if that was unclear, probably need another coffee. Unfortunately Veeam Agent for Windows does not have this logic.

Have you looked at Veeam Backup for Office 365? You can protect local exchange installation, not only Microsoft Office 365, and select specific exchange items to be processed? That's more item level backup but it seems like a decent workaround when you do not want to get extra data sitting in your backup.

[mark49808]

Thanks, that is disappointing. Any plans to add that? Seems like a pretty basic feature for Exchange backups to not store data in triplicate.

We have Veeam Backup for Office 365 but as the licensing is per user that is a very expensive alternative. We have many service accounts and other non-user mailboxes on-prem (that have no presence in o365, therefore are not covered by our license) that we would like to back up. So my Veaam o365 license costs would go way up I imagine.

[Dima P.]

Understood, thanks for the feedback Mark! We do not have short term plans for this functionality but tracking this requests very attentively, I'll add your votes to this feature request.

[msservices]

Hi,

I'm backuping physical IPLess Exchange DAG, and i'm face out an issue related to backup performance.
The Exchange DAG have 9 DBs of 2TB and veeam process backup DB per DB.

Is there is a way to perform multiple DB in parallel

[Andreas Neufert]

IPless DAG mode does not have any influence on the processing performance.

Yes, you can do parallel backup. You likely need to configure more Proxy/Repository task slots so that more disks are processed parallel.

[msservices]

Hi,

Thanks for replyed, but in our case, for 1 node of the exchange DAG veeam perform 1 db after 1 another and not multiple DB on the same node at the same time.

[Andreas Neufert]

To guide you better, what Hypervisor do you use or is it a physical server?

[mdiver]

Any news on this?

Is it still recommended to move all passive DBs to specific nodes and backup only those?

Will a dedupe appliance used as a repository completely eliminate all redundancies if all active and passive DBs are included?
Dedup is on block level and would have to match the layout in the DBs to be well effective. Any experience to be shared here?

We have to backup ~40 physical nodes with mixed active and passive DBs. 4 copies each. 0.5PB in total. So without those tricks we expect to see >2PB in the backups.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi mdiver,
please find many of your answers addressed in my blog entry here:
https://andyandthevms.com/exchange-dag- ... plication/

To go a bit more in detail on your specific request after you read the blog:
Passive node only backup can work, but I would say is not really needed if you have implemented everything well (see my blog). If you decide to do so, please know that by adding another passive node, the cluster failover is affected as you place at a specific site another node and so the quorum for failover need to be considered with your Exchange design architect.

For dedup, yes, in most of the cases dedup engines can reduce the data significantly if you have multiple copies of the same data.

I wonder how you come up with the larger than 2PB of the data for 0.5 PB of data, this looks a bit off.
With 30 days backup, you should end up with 820TB of needed space. https://rps.dewin.me/?m=1&s=524288&r=39 ... g=0&re=1&e

Can you please share what backup retention you want to keep?

[mdiver]

Thanks, Andy.
I'll give your blog (another) read.

2PB related to havin 0,5PB of unique DB data and then multiplying it by 3 because of active + passive + passive. Then add some increments and we are at 2PB (without dedupe).