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BE 2014 Cross-Forest Hyper-V VM Backup of Exchange 2010 with GRT

Appleton
Level 3

Setup:

Domain A & Domain B have a two way trust relationship in place.  They are two separate forests.

Domain A has a Hyper-V cluster, member server on this domain has Backup Exec 2014 media server.
Domain B has a 2010 Exchange server as a virtual machine running on the Hyper-V cluster.

I'm trying to backup the Exchange 2010 server as a virtual machine, using the GRT option

The job completes successfully, but doesn't truncate the logs nor do I get the option to do a granular restore of Exchange items. Odd part is that I dont get any exception warning at all.

I've tested credentials, and currently the credentials that are backing up the Exchange server are from Domain B.

Media Server and Agents are up to date. 

 

7 REPLIES 7

VJware
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

GRT restore option is available only if you highlight the VM itself from the Backup & Restore tab and then initiate the restore. Have a look @ this article by a TA - https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/restoring-individual-filesfolders-vm-backup

And if the logs aren't truncated, check the Exchange VM's event viewer for any relevant errors/warnings. Additionally, was this a one-time backup or a scheduled backup job ? Is a remote agent installed inside the Exchange VM ?

Appleton
Level 3
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I am trying to do the restore from the VM itself as you mentioned. All I get is the option to restore files and folders. During the full backup there were no logs showing on the Exchange VM that showed that it was going through a backup process at all. Update from last night: I did finally get an exception on an incremental backup last night: "Backup Exec was unable to prepare Microsoft Exchange resources for Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) operations" There's no errors in the event viewer on the VM, the writers are all in 'no error' state. I saw in the event viewer where VSS took a snapshot of the database as I would expect this time, but since this was an incremental job it didn't truncate the logs. I've been researching the exception this morning, before you ask I already checked the drive type and it is not a GPT disk.

VJware
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

Is the Exchange VM part of a cluster or DAG ? Is there an Agent for Applications & Database license installed ?

If you run a RAWS based backup of the Exchange VM directly, do the logs truncate and do you see indiviudal items for restore ?

Appleton
Level 3

The Exchange VM is standalone.  No cluster or DAG.

I haven't tried a direct backup of the Exchange server yet. I'd rather not have to do this, was hoping to grab a VM backup from the Hyper-V host. 

One update.  I enabled SGMon and just started a full backup of the VM again.  This time there are ESE events showing snapshots being created.  This is new.  I'll wait to see what happens and what results I get and post them here. 

 

 

VJware
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

The reason why I mentioned using the RAWS agent is to narrow down the error causes (since the Hyper-V host backup also uses the RAWS inside of the VM)

Appleton
Level 3

Full backup completed with exceptions. 

"V-79-57344-38748 - Backup Exec was unable to prepare Microsoft Exchange resources for Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) operations"

Also seeing on the Exchange server that VSS is being triggered, but also stating log files are not being truncated:

"Exchange VSS Writer has successfully completed the copy or differential backup of database 'Mailbox Database'. No logfiles were truncated for this database."

edit:
Also wanted to point out that SGMon isn't showing anything in particular

 

Appleton
Level 3

Interesting.  When I initiate the backup, the EV on the VM is showing the following as snapshot processing is taking place:

"Exchange VSS Writer has successfully prepared the database engine for a full or copy backup of database "

But then after processing is complete I get the following:

"Exchange VSS Writer has successfully completed the copy or differential backup of database"

When I check the status of the database in the shell I am showing the LastCopyBackup status to be the time when I am running the full backup in BE.