Exchange hangs after brick level

[Andrew_Rogers]

We have an issue where whenever we backup mailboxes on our SBS 2003 server, Exchange starts to hang and outlook freezes on the users. The server itself is ok but we have to restart the whole server to get exchange back. The backup job usually completes by the time this happens, but not always! Sometimes Exchange will hang a couple of hours after the backup is done.

It's only backing up the mailboxes that causes the issue, backing up the information store itself doesn't cause the problem. It doesn't hang when you only select a portion of the mailboxes as well and back those up, only when you back them all up, so it doesn't look like its a specific mailbox either..

Any ideas?

Veritas Update is only presenting Hotfix 56 and 1 - security updates and desktop/laptop backup options, it seems.

[priya_khire]

Hello,

Since when does the problem occur? How many mailboxes are you backin up in this job?

Make sure that you have installed SP4a for 9.1. If not, you can download it from the link below:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/280008

[Keith_Langmead]

When are you running these backups? By the sound of it you're doing them during the working day which I would suspect is where you're problem is. My suggestion to you would be to change the schedule to run them during the night when no one will be connecting to Exchange to be effected.

Consider that to do a mailbox backup, Backup Exec uses Outlook to open each mailbox in turn, and reads each and every e-mail to back them up. Now remember that this is all happening at a very fast rate, much faster than than any one or several users could interact with the system, and you can see why it would be putting a lot of load on to your server, and therefore causing connection problems / Outlook freezing for your users.

By comparison, where I work we have quite an old low powered Exchange 2000 server, used by only 7 people, but with a LOT of data stored within it (around 30+GB), all it takes is someone on the network to do a big search on their mailbox and everyone sees their outlook freeze (which would be why we're in the process of upgrading that box).

[Sharvari_Deshmu]

Hello,

We request you to update us on this issue.

Thanks,

[Andrew_Rogers]

Apologies for the late reply - I thought the forums would email me there had been a response!

I believe the server is already on SP4a as it's not presented to install on Veritas/Symantec Update site?

The backups originally ran in the evening through the night when they started failing. We've tried running in the day also, but with the same result, Exchange appears to hang. There's only 20-30 mailboxes or so, totalling approx 9Gb of data. The servers decently specced (HP DL360, 3GHz dual core Xeon with 2Gb RAM) so shouldn't really get too busy. We've run logs checking the disk activity, CPU, memory, etc, and nothing seems to go through the roof.

We're going to try applying the two updates being presented on the Update site shortly and try the backup overnight again to see if they help.

[A_van_der_Boom]

Can you see if the backup fails with a particular mailbox ?

Regards
A van der Boom