Backing up Exchange Store not in VMDK

[cjlemmer]

New to Veeam, but love what I see so far!!!

Our environment is VMWare vSphere 4 on the VM Hosts (3 of them, all Dell PowerEdge), Exchange 2007 VM running on Windows Server 2003, using Veeam Backup 5 to backup our VMs from our primary site (EMC AX4-5i SAN) to a DR site (FalconStor NSS).

Our Exchange VM has 2 drives, the C drive that boots and runs Windows and Exchange, and a D drive which is our Exchange data store. The D drive is actually mapped via the Windows iSCSI initiator to another disk pool on our EMC SAN, so it's not part of the VMDK.

When I backup the Exhange VM, it only backs up the C drive since that's what's in the VMDK. Obviously this doesn't do much good for recovery if my Exchange data store isn't included. in the backup.

Is there any way I can get my Exchange data store to be included, or would I have to move my Exchange data store into the VMDK so that Veeam can see it?

Thank you for any advice.

[tsightler]

Is there any way I can get my Exchange data store to be included, or would I have to move my Exchange data store into the VMDK so that Veeam can see it?

Since Veeam backs up VMware images via ESX, it can only access disks that VMware is actually aware of. iSCSI volumes inside of a guest are invisible to ESX, and thus Veeam. For Veeam to be able to backup your Exchange you either need to move the data to a VMDK, or perhaps use a virtual raw device mapping (not physical, since they can't be snapshotted).

[Gostev]

Yep, adding that disk to Exchange VM as RDM in virtual mode is your best bet.

[cjlemmer]

Thanks for the options. Can someone explain the process of using a virtual RDM so that Veeam can see it, or point me to some documentation on the procedure to set that up?

[Gostev]

You do not have to do anything from Veeam side, we support VMs with vRDM disks transparently.