Backing up Exchange 2010 w/VEEAM v7

[STGdb]

Good morning. I’m setting up VEEAM v7 with VMware and Exchange 2010 and I am in need of a little assistance. I’ve searched the forum for the correct answers but haven’t found exactly what I need.

We have a new install of VEEAM Ent. V7 for VMware (vSphere 5.1 HA cluster). On it we have some Exchange 2010 servers, multiple CA/HT servers in a CAS array, and multiple MBX servers in a DAG. We are using a single dedicated Exchange 2010 VM (a DAG member) to hold a copy of each Exchange DB which is used for backup purposes (to offload the processing needs during backups). We’ve now set up VEEAM to back up this DAG member every couple of hours. We have one Exchange 2010 server per backup job.

Questions are:

(1) When restoring a message, it will go to the original DAG location (to the DAG member used for backup purposes). This is not the active copy of the Exchange DB. Do we need to restore items to maybe a PST then import them into the user’s “live” mailbox?

(2) Exchange 2010 transaction logs. We are backing up the additional DAG members but only the system drives (on these DAG members we are not backing up the drives with the logs or DB’s on them). In order to flush the Exchange 2010 t-logs on these Exchange 2010 servers, does VEEAM need to back up these drives as well or is VEEAM application aware enough to recognize that Exchange 2010 is installed on these systems (it is installed on the system drive that is being backed up), even though we are not backing up the logs or DB drives on those servers? Does the t-logs get flushed on full, incremental or reverse incremental or all of them?


Thanks in advance for any assistance

[veremin]

1) Yep, you can use import to PST functionality, if you have issues with restoring directly to "live" mailbox. Although a better option would be to open a support case and let us investigate why the restore process is picking wrong DAG member in your case. If this appears to be a bug on our part, we will fix it.

2) It doesn’t matter whether you’ve excluded a “log holder” drive or not, the logs will be truncated per the option that is specified in the “Guest Processing” settings of the job. Moreover, the backup mode also has nothing to do with the truncation logs – as long as the required setting is specified, they will be truncated regardless of backup method.

Thanks.

[STGdb]

Sorry to just now get back to you, I've been away for a few days. Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, I'm going to have to open a support case. The logs aren't flushing on any of my Exchange 2010 MBX servers. And test restores give me errors (whether I try to restore to the original location or redirect to another resource).


Thanks again

[Vitaliy S.]

The logs aren't flushing on any of my Exchange 2010 MBX servers.

Might be worth looking through this topic for the answer while waiting for our support team reply > Backing up Exchange 2010 - How to truncate logs?

[STGdb]

Opened a case with support. Still working on this issue (Exchange 2010 log truncation). I isolated the problem and found that logs are generally truncated but end up leaving one log file behind whenever Exchange is backed up. Don't know why but it never seems to remove that one lingering log file from the time the backup was run. Problem is that the logs accumulate and that is a bad thing.