Exchange 2010 Backup and LUN architecture

[vgeek]

Hi,

I am in the process of starting virtualizing Exchange 2010 and I want to make sure that my planned LUN architecture will not cause problems with Veeam backup.
I am planning to create a 1:1 LUN to DB, LUN to Transactional Logs configuration with two DBs and I wasn't sure if this would cause any problems with the way Exchange will be backed up by Veeam. I am still learning virtualization and Veeam and by no mean am an expert in Data Storage so your recommendation will be appreciated. I am also planning to have a couple of personal archive DBs.

[Cokovic]

Shouldn't be a problem at all. One of our biggest VMs is a member of an Exchange DAG cluster having 19 LUNs with 19 VMDKs connected. Every VMDK is on it's own LUN and backup ran fine.

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

I'm struggling with Exchange. Snapshotting is not support on Exchange per Microsoft. I found this out while looking into why my users seem to be disconnected from our mailbox server when a backup is ran on that server, and a snapshot is created. All of my end users report their Outlook asking for a password randomly which led us to research this. It looks to be something related to the snapshot process. It's not all the time though. For instance, our mailbox server was part of a job that was replicating hourly, this didn't cause the Outlook password issue, but the backup I ran last night sure did, right as the snapshot was created via the Veeam backup request, everyone reporting Outlook prompting for a password.

These two related threads were interesting...

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 5d52b662d/
http://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.c ... 0-servers/

[vgeek]

Cokovic, have you experience the same issue jbarrow is describing? Could this be an issolated issue, version issue, or something else?

Can someone share also some best practice for Backing up Exchange 2010 with Veeam?

[foggy]

Cokovic, have you experience the same issue jbarrow is describing? Could this be an issolated issue, version issue, or something else?

There is a huge existing topic regarding issues like that, worth reviewing.

Can someone share also some best practice for Backing up Exchange 2010 with Veeam?

Here is an old webinar covering general aspects of Exchange backup and restore in details. And you can also search this forum for numerous existing topics regarding that.

[Cokovic]

In fact snapshots on a virtualised Exchange environment are not supported by Microsoft in ANY case. Regardless if it's VSS aware or not. This is so far my very own experience with Microsoft and VMWare on a case i had open with them.

In our environment we have 3 HUB/CAS servers (with a loadbalancer in front of them) and a 3 node DAG cluster running. There have been several issues we had to struggle with. One was a randomly disconnect from the mailbox in Outlook that i could observe sometimes on my own account too. And i had it once happen right in the moment where snapshot of a particular HUB/CAS server took place. There were alot of other users complaining about it too. So i've changed the backup job for our HUB/CAS server to run only once a week in the night. Since then we had no more any complains from our users. And since there are no changes on a running HUB/CAS server which requires a regular backup i'm fine with a weekly backup. Also a HUB/CAS can be build from scratch quite easy.

So maybe you could give it a try to move the HUB/CAS server role away from your mailbox server to another VM and see if it helps. I'm sorry that there won't be a better solution for it as snapshot creation and consolidation, in the way it works now, heavily depends on your underlying storage. And this is for sure the issue you experience here.

The other main issue was related to some VSS timeout and log truncation errors that i've described more detailed here.