Best practice to back up large exchange VM.

[JasonPGTF]

I'm having intermittent issues with my Exchange VM server's backup. I notice that the backup took about 5hours to complete and a few times up to 8hrs. The Exchange VM is quite large, abt 4TB and the issue appear during snapshot deletion process. This is the part when users complain that their email can't be access & once snapshot job is completed the email functionality goes back to normal. Snapshot deletion took more than 2 hrs to finish.

Is there any other way I can improve the backup speed & avoid these disturbance to the users? I'm thinking of using storage snapshot to do the backup, will storage snapshot able to perform PITR or even recover the content of user's emails?

The slowness of exchange backups also impacted the schedule of other backup jobs.

[HannesK]

Hello,

I'm thinking of using storage snapshot to do the backup

yes, backup from storage snapshot (BfSS) was built to address exactly your situation. long lasting VM snapshots.

will storage snapshot able to perform PITR or even recover the content of user's emails?

please keep in mind that backup from storage snapshot is real backup. Snapshot only jobs are keeping the data on the production storage. Both options allow single item restore. No difference there.

point in time recovery is not available for Exchange (neither BfSS nor snapshot-only jobs)

Best regards,
Hannes

[Andreas Neufert]

You can as well check this one out: http://andyandthevms.com/exchange-dag-v ... plication/