Veeam / Exchange / Symantec EVault

[varrus999]

Hi,

We are using VEEAM 5.x with VSS to backup an Exchange 2010 VM we host for a customer. The customer wants to have the ability to do their own granular mail item restores (they don't have access to our VEEAM console), and has been using Evault and wants to continue using evault. Evault can do full Exchange backups, or mailbox backups only using MAPI - they want to do the MAPI backups and let us do the full Exchange backup for DRP purposes.

I am wondering if this will cause any issues as far as restores go and if there will be any conflicts with VSS. At the very least, I would make sure the two backups aren't running at the same time.

Thanks,

Mike.

[Gostev]

Hi Mike, this will work just fine. No conflicts if they do MAPI backups only. Thanks.

[varrus999]

Thanks for the quick reply. Can their MAPI backup run at the same time as the VEEAM job?

And from your reply, I gather there would be conflicts if they ran anything other than MAPI backups?

Mike.

[tsightler]

I don't know specifically regarding Symantec Enterprise Vault (which is what I assume you mean by EVault), but I think that Enterprise Vault is really an email archive solution that has the ability to perform single item restores (well, and larger restores for that matter). I believe that Enterprise Vault has services that perform both Journaling, and Mailbox archiving via agent tasks (I'm pulling this from memory from our eval a couple of years ago). We use a very similar products, Quest Archive Manager, which does exactly the same thing, it has both a Journal Loader, and a Mailbox Archiver service which basically crawls folders using MAPI to load data from the journal mailbox and build user mailbox folder hierarchies. We these processes all the time, completely independent of our Veeam backups and we don't have any issues. Actually, we even use Veeam to backup our Archive Manager servers.

Since I believe that Enterprise Vault and Archive Manager use the same basic technique, I doubt that this will have any problem at all. The only potential issue is that having the Mailbox Archiver running during a Veeam backup causes the snapshot size to grow significantly during the backup period because of all the small "touches" on the mailboxes, but we haven't found this to be an issue as long as the backup happens during a relatively quiet time. Archive Manager allows you to schedule downtime for the Mailbox Archiver service if this is an issue so I'd assume Enterprise Vault has a similar feature but I don't remember for sure.