Exchange appears to drop offline during backup

[573411378]

Hello!

We have a small application that monitors the availablity of our Exchange server by pinging it every 30 seconds. After receiving a reply it validates that all Exchange related services are running. This app works great except for one time per night. This appears to coinside with the backup job running on the server. It only happens once, and 30 seconds later the app reports Exchange is fully available again (even though the backup job is still running). I checked the Event logs on the exchange server and there is no indication that the server dropped offline.


My question is... Does BackupExec lock out connections or shut down services before or during a backup job? Why would the server be unavailable at this time and for only 30 seconds?

Thanks so very much in advance!

[Rohit_Sonawale]

Hi,

Thank you for posting your query,

While performing backup we would suggest to stop the third party software even Antivirus software. If any third party application interact with backup while performing backup of data the job is likely to fail or it may take very long time to complete its task.

We hope this information helps, if you have any other questions please respond to the post and we will be more than happy to assist you further.

[573411378]

Hello! Thank you for the reply. You mentioned that it may take a very long time for the for the server to respond, why is this? I'm more curious than anything, since I'll need to report this information to my managers.

Thanks again!
Dave

[Dave_Fortin]

Do you mean that we should disable Anti-Virus auto-protect completely during a backup? Or that we should not be doing a system scan at the time. I don't think it's a particularly good idea to completely disable the AV product at anytime no matter what.

[Collin_Chaffin]

Just curious, are you backiing up the exchange storage group using volume shadow copy? If so, I believe what you're seeing is the "freeze" of the snapshot.

[573411378]

I had considered that as well, and we're not using volume shadow copy, in fact the service is disabled.

[Dave_Bunye]

Backup Exec would not be the one locking out connections, that would be Exchange. BE makes a call to Exchange and gets the response from Exchange, BE cannot control what Exchange does. In response to your questions, I would assume that your app is querying Exchange while Exchange is responding to BE to process the backup.

I run anti virus realtime all the time and have no issue with Exchange backups. However, some people have had issues and use pre/post commands to shut down the anti virus software while the backup runs and then automatically restart it once the jobs completes. If you are having no problems with your backups, don't worry about shutting AV down.

[Amruta_Purandar]

Hello,

Backup exec does not lock Exchange. However it will query Exchange to retrieve information for backup.

So the possibility could be that your application queries at the same time as Backup Exec which might cause this delay. Though not sure why your application may not work. But this seems like the most likely cause of the issue.

NOTE: If we do not receive your intimation within two business days, this post would be assumed answered and archived.

[Sheetal_Risbood]

As per our previous reply, marking the case as assumed answered and moving it to answered questions pool.

[573411378]

Since my question has been lingering, I'm assuming no one has a solution. All of the above messages were nothing more than guesses, none of which solved the problem.

[tejashree_Bhate]

Hello,

Which is the application that you are using? Please let us know so that we can research on this issue.


Thanks.

NOTE : If we do not receive your intimation within two business days, this post would be marked assumed answered and would be moved to the answered threads pool.

[573411378]

The application is a small program we wrote ourselves specifically for the purpose of monitoring Exchange availability and the status of services. The app uses Microsoft code as well as some we have written ourselves.

[tejashree_Bhate]

Hello,

As the Backup job and the application coincide, Backup Exec takes control of the server. Thats the reason the application reports the server to be offline. The server is not offline else the job wouldnt run. When running a Backup job with any third party application Backup Exec takes precedence.

Usually thats the reason we recommend to stop all third party software or services while executing a Backup job.

Hope that answers your question

NOTE : If we do not receive your intimation within two business days, this post would be marked assumed answered and would be moved to the answered threads pool.

[Sheetal_Risbood]

As per our previous reply, marking the case as assumed answered and moving it to answered questions pool.