Exhange OS Only Backup

[mwoolfenden]

Hello,

I'm looking at the best way to backup an Exchange 2013 DAG, we have a single DAG split over two datacentres, active copies of all the databases in primary, passive copies on Exchange servers in secondary, which is where our repository is located.

The obvious initial part is to backup the passive database copies en masse at regular intervals, however I have a query about the best way to get only the OS and system state of the active servers such that we're not dragging a second copy of the DBs over the WAN on each backup.

Would I be correct in assuming it is as simple as doing an application consistent backup of the active servers but setting the exclusions in the backup job to only backup disk 0:0 or is it more complex than this? I've been having trouble locating any documentation that disucsses the best way to make sure you are backing up the 'other' servers in the DAG for which you already have database copies backed up.

Many Thanks,

[PTide]

Hi,

The method of excluding disk 0:0 should work fine. Also there is another way to avoid database file transfer - try to use VM Guest OS File Exclusion.

Thanks you.

[mwoolfenden]

Hi again guys,

Following on, I ended up implementing the backup of the primary servers OS only as above and all has been fine for a few months.

After finally completing the migration of all mailboxes now I have noticed on occasion the primary backup will trigger a failover of databases as the cluster decides the server has lost connectivity. This seems to happen at the point of snapshot removal which happens half an hour after the snapshot is taken due to what I believe is sheer size of the servers (while I'm not backing up the database volumes on these primary servers they do end up totalling just over 5TB per server). I expect that the VM stun when deleting the snapshots after this period of time is just long enough to be occasionally exceeding the cluster failover timeout.

I'd already changed the windows cluster failover timers as per KB1744, with a servers of this size am do I have any other options than to increase these timeout values further?

Many Thanks,

[foggy]

There's a dedicated thread regarding backing up Exchange DAG that contains a lot of hints, I recommend reviewing it prior to extending timeouts further.