Veeam / Exchange 2010, what others are doing?

[link12]

I'm curious to hear from a few folks that are using Veeam with there Exchange 2010 environment. We're currently getting ready to deploy Veeam in our ESX environment to support 10 Exchange servers, 4 CAS HUB, 4 MB, 2 UM. We have about 8 TB of mailbox databases, 5000 users. Curious as to the size of other companies and how Exchange 2010 and Veeam is working.

[ejleipold]

I have a single Exchange 2010 server that's about 1.1TB, it does about 10Gb worth of incremental a day. You're gunna have some big incrementals there...

[pacmantravis]

We have a little over 3TB spread out amongst 6 servers (3 MB, 3 CAS/HUB).

I've been around Veeam for around 4 years now and we use it for all of our VMs with the exception of Exchange. We are using BackupExec for Exchange. Our main issues are the inherent problems when using VMware based snapshots for backup of Exchange. We have run into issues where failed backups failed to remove the vm snapshot or when backups take longer than usual and snapshot commits happen in the middle of the day (degrading Exchange performance). Also, not to mention having to change the DAG settings in Exchange so the mailbox databases don't fail over due to the freeze period when snapshots are commited. Again, not just a Veeam problem, but an obstacle to overcome with backup software based on VMware snapshots. Exchange Servers (and SQL servers to an extent) seem to be affected most.

While Veeam is a great product for most VMs out there (especially with a fast backend infrastructure), you may want to look into more conventional agent-based Exchange backups. Or, products like Simpana 9 which still utilize VMware snapshots, but also use the snapshot capability of your primary storage system (EMC, NetApp, etc) so that the VMware snapshot is only used for a few minutes instead of the duration of the backup. However, that's a different price range and market altogether.