Exchange 2010 and Reverse Incremental

[doggatas]

Hi

I am about to start using Veeam 6.5 to backup our Exchange 2010 active mailbox server (DAG), it's passive member is located in our DR datacentre. The mailbox server is a virtual machine hosted on an ESXi 5.0 update 2 host(S), which in turn is attached to an IBM DS3524.

I have configured the appropriate cluster timeout value for the DAG cluster to prevent inadvertent failover, I have also configured the databases to never automatically mount in the DR site. Exchange server DB sizes range from 30Gb to 70Gb across 7 databases for a total size of 620 Gb.

I am already backing up supplementary VM guests such as the Hub transport, client access and BES server using Veeam reverse incremental (8 restore points), which I must say is working superbly. The mailbox server is being backed up by Symantec Backup Exec at present. Based on the success of the current Veeam backup job I am ready to make the jump to use Veeam to backup the mailbox server.

I also am loving the Exchange Explorer, it is brilliant. I can't recall, but I trialed this program when it was sold and labeled under another name, I put forward to the company to buy it back then but was not successful. So good to see I finally have my hands on it.

Now to the real question. Is it advisable to use reverse incremental to backup Exchange 2010? Will this truncate the log files correctly provided i tick the application aware check box? The plan is to run the job daily with 8 restore points?

Cheers and thanks in advance.

Cheers
David

[Gostev]

Hi, reversed incremental is generally slower due to extra I/O required, so just do a test run and make sure you can fit your backup window. Yes, log truncation will work fine if you enable application-aware processing.

Veeam Explorer for Exchange was never sold separately or labeled under another name, we've only developed it in-house recently (last year).

Thanks!

[doggatas]

Thanks for the reply. Have only just gotten around to backing up the Exchange 2010 server for the first. Being the first time and a bit of a test, I selected application aware (VSS) but do not delete transaction logs as I am still backing up with B Exec, only for another week thank god.

Given I selected do not delete logs should I expect to see the following in the event viewer on the mailbox server:

Exchange VSS Writer (instance 3eff65c5-ac4e-4d73-8c55-43a2e4df1a41:408) has completed the backup of database 'DB_E-G' with errors. The backup did not complete successfully, and no log files were truncated for this database.


I am hoping this is because i chose not to delete log files. The above event was logged for all databases on the mailbox server.

Cheers
David

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, these kind of messages are expected when you choose not to truncate transaction logs. Thanks!