Exchange in SureBackup Virtual Lab environment

[rmandrews7]

Hello,

I'm having an issue with my surebackup virtual lab and I’m looking for feedback. I am having difficulties bringing up Exchange 2010 in the virtual lab. I make sure my domain controller’s spin up first, but it seems to always fail at the ping test. Exchange will spin up probably one of every 10 attempts in my virtual labs. I have double checked to make sure all my vlans are set up properly. Has anyone run into this issue before? Suggestions?

Thanks!

Ryan

[Gostev]

Exchange will spin up probably one of every 10 attempts in my virtual labs.

I would start from troubleshooting vPower NFS performance with your setup. Does Exchange startup reasonably fast in the lab, or it takes hours? In latter case, may be some of its components are simply timing out during startup.

[rmandrews7]

What would be the best method to troubleshoot the NFS performance? What should I be looking for?

Thanks for the response.

Ryan

[foggy]

Ryan, as Anton said above, the first metric is the VM start-up time. It should be comparable to the one for the corresponding production VM (a bit slower, depending on the storage, but not significantly). What time does it take for this VM to boot up in your lab (at those times when it starts successfully)?

[rmandrews7]

the exchange server boots up in about two-three minutes when it boots up correctly.

[Gostev]

Then this is definitely not the case. What are the errors in the Event Log on the Exchange VM in cases when it does not spin up correctly?

[Cokovic]

I make sure my domain controller’s spin up first, but it seems to always fail at the ping test.

Does this belong to your DC within your lab with the failing ping test?
Is your DC a Windows Server 2008 with VMXNEt3 network interface? If so you should first install a Microsoft patch for that. Links can be found here.
Did you also check any roles for your DC in the application group (like DC, DNS and Global Catalog role)?

[rmandrews7]

The DC spins up just fine, only the exchange server fails during ping

[Cokovic]

Then maybe its firewall related. As stated by Espen in this thread he had to enable inbound rules to get it working (i know it's not the same issue that you got but it goes into a similar direction).

Do you see any other error besides the ping error in your Surebackup realtime statistics when you fire up the job?

[rmandrews7]

That is the only error I receive