VSS timeout with Exchange 2010

[dlbenson1979]

I have v8 patch 1 and I cannot get my exchange 2010 job to back up. What I don't understand is how this job will run fine for months, but as soon as it fails, it fails no matter how many times i restart the exchange box, veeam server, or veeam proxy. I have looked at all the above information, many veeam KB articles (i.e. 1680, etc) and I have a ticket in with veeam techs.

The only thing that i have been wondering about is the amount of free space on the exchange drives. My C: drive is down to about 11%, and I am wondering if adding space to that disk will matter at all in this process.

[foggy]

Judging on one of the previous posts in this thread, it could matter.

[dlbenson1979]

Could anyone comment on how much space vss needs to function properly? Is it a percent of the disk? or a flat number?

[Andreas Neufert]

You can analyse it with
vssadmin list shadowstorage
check the max needed space value from the output.

Based from my personal experience I would not go with a c:\drive with less than 3GB free space.

[Andreas Neufert]

I have v8 patch 1 and I cannot get my exchange 2010 job to back up. What I don't understand is how this job will run fine for months, but as soon as it fails, it fails no matter how many times i restart the exchange box, veeam server, or veeam proxy. I have looked at all the above information, many veeam KB articles (i.e. 1680, etc) and I have a ticket in with veeam techs.

Check the Windows Event Log... What errors do you see?
Are they related to space problems?

[nmace]

I've been fighting this for quite some time. Sometimes the job would work fine and other times it would fail for (seemingly) no reason. Since upgrading the V8, our Exchange job has worked perfectly.

[fjones]

Anyone get backups working with SBS 2011 and veeam 8? Reading the limitations of persistent snaphots they don't work on a domain controller. Doing testing prior to deploying and it always fails. Even tried the dismount/mount trick a few minutes before the backup runs. I will try moving the database off the system drive to see if that helps.

[ashman70]

I have several clients with SBS 2011 and I am using Veeam 8 to backup and in some cases replicate their SBS 2011 VM in vmware and I have no issues. I have had issues in the past however and found that if the sbs 2011 vm was on slow storage such as raid 5, it was an issue, moving the vm to faster storage such as raid 10 resolved my problems.

[Andreas Neufert]

I have several clients with SBS 2011 and I am using Veeam 8 to backup and in some cases replicate their SBS 2011 VM in vmware and I have no issues. I have had issues in the past however and found that if the sbs 2011 vm was on slow storage such as raid 5, it was an issue, moving the vm to faster storage such as raid 10 resolved my problems.

Thank you for this feedback.

Please let me add that usage of Backup & Replication v8 is very critical here as Veeam added an special VSS SnapShot to reflect Exchange limitations.

[Andreas Neufert]

I've been fighting this for quite some time. Sometimes the job would work fine and other times it would fail for (seemingly) no reason. Since upgrading the V8, our Exchange job has worked perfectly.

Thank you for this feedback.

[jguilmette]

Hello, i've been working on this issue for a customer since 2 months. And right now, it's finally working. Here's my receipe (Sorry for the bad english, i speak french) ;

** Windows SBS 2011 (SP3 applied to exchange / no roll up) running on ESXi 5.0 with RAID6 (SAS 15k) backing up to QNAP NAS using Veeam 8 with the latest patch **

1.) Remove all snapshots for the VM (Using vSphere \ Remove snapshots all).
2.) Disable and delete all shadows on the VM (vssuirun + vssadmin delete shadows /all) .
3.) On my vCenter where Veeam is installed (Running on the same host as the Windows 2011 SBS but hosted on QNAP NAS nfs storage) i only had the vcenter host added to Veeam console so i decided to add the standalone ESXi which hosting my SBS 2011 VM.
4.) In my backup job i deleted the SBS2011 VM from the job then save and close. Re edit the backup job and re add the SBS2011 VM but this time, using the standalone ESXi previously added instead on the vcenter host.
5.) Hit "Retry" on the job, problem solved !

Hope it can help.