Best practies to backup MS Exchange 2010 configured in a mixed environment physical and virtual (vmware)

[mero244]

I have a MS Exchange 2010 with two nodes and protect them with a policy MS Exchange configured as follows:
- In the "Clients" I put the cluster Excahnge;
- for "Backup Selection" I have selected Microsoft Exchange Database Availability Groups: \.

Recently we added another node MS Exchange in a VMware.
What do you think the best configuration to protect the virtual machine (to restore the entire virtual machine)?
Thanks

[INT_RND · Accepted solution]

Best practice is to use 2 policies.

1. A VMware policy to protect the host system as a whole.

2. An Exchange policy to protect the mailbox database data.

In Netbackup 7.6 you can protect an Exchange server through a VMWare snapshot using the new application protection options. However, this is a new feature and it doesn't support GRT on a DAG. This is why I would recommend using the Exchange agent to protect the Exchange data instead of using the VMWare feature.

For more information read the application protection options in the VMware Administrator's Guide on page 61:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC6461