Can I Replicate an Exchange Cluster with Veeam...

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

Can I Replicate an Exchange Cluster with Veeam without users noticing any issues? For instance, they aren't going to get disconnected from each server and prompted for credentials or to restart Outlook all day long (or every time a snapshot is taken). We have a three node Exchange cluster, 2 nodes at site A, 1 node at site B. We want to replicate the nodes at A to B, and from B to A but were fearful of end user issues during replication.

[Shestakov]

Hello Jonathan,
Replication job as well as backup may have a long snapshot commit time, thus impact the end user performane.
I would give it a try to and review the job statistics.

Do you also backup this Exchange cluster? What vSphere version are you at?
Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Also you may want to adjust tolerance values for this Exchange cluster, there was an existing topic about the same question.

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

Hello Jonathan,
Replication job as well as backup may have a long snapshot commit time, thus impact the end user performane.
I would give it a try to and review the job statistics.

Do you also backup this Exchange cluster? What vSphere version are you at?
Thanks!

We are using a NetApp FAS8020 which has storage snapshot capability by the way. Will this help with the snapshot commit time?

We are on vSphere 5.5 still. We do not currently backup this cluster, we don't snapshot it at all right now.

[PTide]

Hi,

Will this help with the snapshot commit time?

Yes, this will help. The whole thing works in the following way:

- vmware takes a snapshot of VM that is to be backed up
- storage system takes it's own snapshot that contains aforementioned vmware's snapshot within it
- vmware snapshot is released
- backup is taken from storage snapshot
- storage snapshot is released

Intergration with storage snapshots reduces an impact on production because the lifetime of vmware snapshot gets significantly reduced.

For more info please refer to this thread and helpcenter.

Thank you.

[jmmarton]

We are on vSphere 5.5 still.

You may want to look at upgrading to vSphere 6.0 with Update 1b. VMware has made significant changes to snapshot consolidation which may make a significant difference in performance to reduce (if not eliminate) potential issues during backup and replication jobs. One of our solutions architects has done some informal testing and noticed a night and day difference between 5.5 vs 6.0U1b. Here's an article about the changes as well.

http://cormachogan.com/2016/01/06/snaps ... phere-6-0/

Joe