Slow Exchange mailbox backup

[John_Marinac]

I'm having slow mailbox problem that I see alot of people having. I've tried re-installing the agent, making AV expections, defraging, changing exch maint schedule and nothing seemed to help much. I'm backup up 2 exch servers from the same backup server and tape drive and one works great.


Please advise:


Here are my results:

Exchange server 1:

Mailboxes: 46.0 MB/Min

IStore: 560 MB/Min




Exchange server 2:

mailboxes: 130 MB/Min

IStore: 652 MB/Min

[John_Marinac]

Sorry I forgot to list the server detail...

All servers are Windows 2003 SP1
Both Exchange servers are Exch 2003 SP2
Backup server is 10.1D

[Deepali_Badave]

Hello,

Please refer the following technotes:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/249090
http://support.veritas.com/docs/241858


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[John_Marinac]

Already did both of those, with little luck

ie: changing exch maint schedule


How would either of these account for one backing up at a proper speed, but not the other?

[John_Marinac]

any other suggestions?

[John_Marinac]

anyone?

[John_Marinac]

Is it too much to ask for a legitimate timley response?

[Deepali_Badave]

Hello,

Stop the antivirus service during the backup of exchnage mailboxes.

Are you using aofo during the backup of exchnage?If yes, please note that it is not recommended.


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[Future5]

I too am experiencing slow brick-level backups in Exchange 2003 while the rest of the backups run at normal speed.

We use the AOFO.

Why is this not recommended?

And is it possible to exclude a single server from using AOFO when the rest of the servers in the job use it?

[John_Marinac]

I am not using AOFO.

I will stop Symantec AV for Exchange tonight when the backup runs and see what happens. I can't however use that as a permanent fix, for obvious reasons.

[Ken_Putnam]

Don't now why one server backs up at twice the speed of the other (is one local to the media server and one accessed over the network?), but Mailbox backups (as done by Veritas/Symantec) are inherently slow. They also often present problems when one tries to restore from them. On top of everything else, they are totally unsupported by Microsoft.

One last comment - When/If it comes time to do a disaster recovery of Exchange, brick level are worthless.


With all this in mind, are you sure that you really want to do Brick Level backups in the first place. With stores level backups and a Recovery Storage Group, you can get anything back that you want.

For a more indepth discussion of brick level backups, see http://mail.tekscan.com/nomailboxes.htm it is a little dated, but all the points are still valid.

[Eli_Spaans]

As Ken stated: Recovery Storage Group. Check the internet for using this.

If you really want Brick-Level, start of with an Exchange Store defrag.
I do see a performance problem, BTW. The IStore should be backup up at pretty much the same speed on both servers.

So an offline Defrag should not be a bad idea anyway.

[John_Marinac]

Offline Defrags have recently been done.

Both servers are network attachment 100mb

I tried it with SAV for Exch disabled during the backup for 1 week and got the same results.

[Michael_Landry]

I believe that slow brick-level backups are just the nature of the beast.

My Exchange server is attached to separate backup network running Gig ethernet and I still only get 104MB/min speed on the mailbox backups...everything else runs at over 600MB/min on the same server. I'm backing up to disk first, then to tape from the disk data sets.

[shweta_rege]

Hello,


We suggest you to perform some tests on the problematic machines:

There is a tool you can download from

http://www.apparentnetworks.com/veritas_sas/

(pick your OS). That when run will perform a traceroute with diagnostics on the network link.

Please download the tool to the affected machines into c:\sas

Switch to a DOS prompt and cd \sas

The syntax would be to run sas where IP is the address of the server we are going to.

A report will be generated in the c:\sas\out directory in XML format




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Thanks.