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Restoring exchange DAG mailboxes

AlexNtowGH
Level 4
Partner

An Exchange DAG Architecture has multiple mailboxes with active and passive Databases for high availabilty, how does Netbackup determine which mailboxes and respective DB in the DAG to restore when needed?

Thanks for your numerous answers in advance

 

4 REPLIES 4

Lowell_Palecek
Level 6
Employee

The question is a little confused.

When you back up a DAG, NetBackup chooses which mailbox server to use for which mailbox database. Mainly it depends on your policy configuration,  whether you choose to back up passive copies of the databases, active copies, or passive-if-available-otherwise-active. If multiple passive copies of a database are available, NetBackup looks at the backup history for that database.

There are other factors in choosing the servers for backing up passive database copies. We spent a lot of effort documenting this in the NetBackup for Exchange Admin Guide. Please read it.

Exchange requires that we restore a database to the server with the active copy, or to a recovery database (RDB).

Veritas calls restoring individual mail folders and items Granular Restore Technology (tm). Using GRT does not change which mailbox servers are used for the backup. GRT restore executes on the mailbox server that you specify as your destination client. If you specify the DAG as the destination, then NetBackup chooses a mailbox server to represent the DAG. However, the actual mail item updates and insertions occur on a server that Exchange chooses because GRT restore uses EWS via a url that Microsoft autodiscovery provides.

Lowell,

thanks for your response,

So i gather, in a DAG constellation, NBU will select the last backup which is the most current backup to restore.

I will certainly read the guide, but i needed a quick explaination to how that works for my customer.

Thank you.

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

@AlexNtowGH wrote:

 

So i gather, in a DAG constellation, NBU will select the last backup which is the most current backup to restore.

 


No. You or the Exchange Admin selects the date (from the backup history in the GUI) to restore from. 

You haven't said how you plan to invoke the restore. If you are using the Backup, Archive, and Restore ("BAR") panel in the NetBackup admin console, or the Windows BAR app, then you can select one backup image, or a set of images. For a DAG, you likely will have multiple images from a single backup run, because the various databases are likely to be backed up on different mailbox servers. You should select the whole set unless you know which image has the database or mail contents that you want to restore.

When you use the bprestore command, you can specify a single backup image by its backup id, or you can specify a range of dates.

If an item being restored is present on more than one image you select, or more than one image in the range of dates you specify, then the NetBackup master server selects the most recent backup image for each item that you are restoring. This can result in multiple restore jobs, one for each backup image to be used.

Not any of this is specific to Exchange except for using DAG as an example of how you can have multiple images from which to restore. In addition to the Exchange admin guide, please see the main NetBackup Administration Guide.