Forum Discussion

DPFreelance's avatar
DPFreelance
Level 4
5 years ago

Exchange VM backup

I have an unusal scenario:

We've fully retired our old Exchange 2010 environment and the admin wants an archive of the VMs that ran this stuff.

Looking at the VM's, I notice that all the data drives aren't mounted/drive lettered like a 'normal' drive would be in Windows.

Question is:  how will NBU handle those drives?  Will they be included in a Vmware/snapshot type policy backup job?  If so, will they be recoverable if needed?  (the VMs are currently powered off, so no application level interference should occur)

8.1.2
AIX
  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    5 years ago

    Before deleting the original VMs, then as long as you retain your original VMs undisturbed, then you could try this:

    1) restore the VMs to alternate location

    2) compare restored config to original config - is it the same?

    3) strip off or disable or re-route the virtual networking of the restored VMs

    4) boot the restored VMs - and confirm that required old data is viewable

  • Lowell_Palecek's avatar
    Lowell_Palecek
    Level 6
    5 years ago

    A VMware backup policy has an "Application Protection" option to "Enable Exchange Recovery." This option requires the VM to be powered up and the Exchange databases to be mounted. Therefore, you won't be able to browse your backups using the "MS Exchange Server" policy type.

    However, the VMware policy does back up the Exchange data files provided they are on a volume that is included in the VM snapshot. That is your question.

    You can test whether the data files are backed up without restoring the whole VM, in fact without restoring anything. The proof is in the browse. Can you see the files when you browse the backup using the VMware policy type? Check for the paths to the .edb files as well as the paths to the log files.

    • DPFreelance's avatar
      DPFreelance
      Level 4
      5 years ago
      Lowell_Palecek wrote:

      A VMware backup policy has an "Application Protection" option to "Enable Exchange Recovery." This option requires the VM to be powered up and the Exchange databases to be mounted. Therefore, you won't be able to browse your backups using the "MS Exchange Server" policy type.

      Yeah, I was torn on this.  From my experience with VM's, if you grab them in a powered off state, that can be an ideal state, so I went with that option first.  Thankfully these are just "Just In Case"/emergency copies; the Exchange team is 99.99% sure they'll never need these. Short term retention too.

      It looks like it grabbed all the disks attached to the VM, so it should be good!

      We may also try restoring one of these just for grins to see what it grabbed.

      • DPFreelance's avatar
        DPFreelance
        Level 4
        5 years ago

        Update:

        We tried restoring this backup copy and everything seemed to work just fine; all disks presented as expected.  We didn't let it back on the network or test anything with services, but everything else looked good.

  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    Moderator
    5 years ago

    Before deleting the original VMs, then as long as you retain your original VMs undisturbed, then you could try this:

    1) restore the VMs to alternate location

    2) compare restored config to original config - is it the same?

    3) strip off or disable or re-route the virtual networking of the restored VMs

    4) boot the restored VMs - and confirm that required old data is viewable