backups of passive copies of mailbox DBs in Exchange 2010 DAG

[liuyang]

Hi, my master server is NBU 7.1 on Windows 2008 R2 SP1. We have four Exchange 2010 mailbox servers (Exchange 2010, Windows 2008 R2) in one DAG. We have configured all mailbox servers to be SAN media servers (NBU 7.1) as we do not want the backup traffic go through production LAN. In the backup policy, we choose passive copy only (or passive copy from preferred server). But for each maillbox DB, it can have mutliple passive copies across the nodes. So in the current settings, the multiple passive copies will be all backed up which we think it is a waste of resource as we only need one backup copy. If we choose active copy or passive copy if not available active copy, sometimes the mailbox server will look for the active copy and if that active copy is in another server, it will back it up via prod LAN.

My question is:

In this case, is there a way to back up one passive copy only? Or is there a way to force NBU to back up active copy in the preferred server only?

[Mark_Solutions]

I think your issue here may be more the media servers than the Exchange Servers

I assume you have all of them listed in the Storage Unit Group so when NetBackup makes its requests it allocates the Media Server and its resources from your group, then it starts the job and finds the passive node to back up from, which may be on a different Media Server.

The only way you could really pin it down is, assuming that by default you databases have a preferred server, is to have a policy for each database with just the Media Server that it resides on as the storage unit and then select active copy only.

When backing up to a dedicated Media Server what you have should be fine, especially if using a dedicated backup LAN, but by making the exchange servers into Media servers i think you have too many variables to ping it down other than how i have outlined above which would only pass the data over the LAN if a database had failed over to another node

Hope this helps