Exchange Hot Backup 1 hr 30 mins

[sauterson]

Hello,

We have an Exchange Server hot backup time being excessive. It has been going on for months about 10-12. We just did a recent upgrade of vcenter and our hosts (about a month ago), which I thought would have helped. But it is the same behavior. When it is preparing guest for hot backup, it can range from 1 hour 20 minutes up to 1 hour 30 minutes. In the beginning this hot backup would take 10-20 minutes. We have had veeam for about 4 years. The backup does complete (total time 2-4 hours depending on change rate) but exchange will freeze for 5-10 minutes at times. Luckily we are not impacted because we run the backup after hours. I have verified that NO snapshots have hung around or someone created one and forgot to remove it. I am hoping someone has ran into this before or maybe had a similar issue. We also have an Exchange Server (VM size 2 TB) in another location (matching vmware and veeam backup environment).Only difference is we are using Cisco UCS chassis and that location is using cisco blade servers. That hot backup only take about 11 minutes.

Veeam Backup & Replication 11 Build: 11.0.1.1261 P20211211
Windows Server 2019 Version 1809 (OS Build 17763.3532)
Storage - Nimble - Backup Repo is 120 TB

VMware
vSphere Client version 7.0.3.00600
Host
Hypervisor: VMware ESXi, 7.0.2, 18426014
Model: UCSB-B200-M5

Only VM on the job. Application-aware enabled. Guest file system indexing NOT enabled. We do have other jobs with application-aware turned on, SQL Server, and they take about 7-15 minutes depending on the server. This exchange job runs by itself as a main backup (Other main jobs are spread out so they don't overlap). Depend on the change rate of other backups, the only thing that overlaps is some backup copy jobs, at max 1-2 jobs.

Exchange VM size - 2.8 TB
Exchange 2016 CU22
Windows Server 2016 Version 1607 (OS Build 14393.5427)

I have opened tickets with Veeam but I usually get the same responses. Try a windows backup, restart server, restart vss writers...etc. We have had to increase the VssPreparationTimeout in the registry as suggested by support. This has helped as sometimes it did fail. It just baffles me that it is taking this long during a hot backup.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks for your time

[Regnor]

Are you using storage snapshots for the backup? If so, I would disable them temporarily and retry the job.

In addition check if the log truncation is working and there are no errors in te Windows event log during the backup.

[Mildur]

Hi Scott

Veeam Backup & Replication 11 Build: 11.0.1.1261 P20211211

Please update also to the newest build of Veeam. Your version is affected by known security vulnerabilities.
https://www.veeam.com/kb4288
https://www.veeam.com/kb4290

I have opened tickets with Veeam but I usually get the same responses. Try a windows backup, restart server, restart vss writers...etc. We have had to increase the VssPreparationTimeout in the registry as suggested by support. This has helped as sometimes it did fail. It just baffles me that it is taking this long during a hot backup.

What's the case numbers? Please provide them with me as requested for technical issues.
If you were unhappy about the outcome of a case, please use our "Talk to a manager" function.
https://www.veeam.com/kb2320

Thank you
Fabian