Ntbackup behaviour for Exchange IP Less

[AndresV]

Hi guys,

We have 4 servers that are part of Exchange environment (IP Less). In the local data center we have ex01 and ex02, in the remote data center we have ex11 and ex12. There is an extended LAN between them.

On ex01 are the active odd databases and passive even databases, on ex02 are active odd databases and passive even databases, ex11 is a replication from ex01, and ex12 is replication from ex02. The policy backups passive databases.

In preferred list we have: 1) ex02 2)ex02 3)ex11 4) ex12 the virtual name is dag1. Right now using bptestbpcd the master is resolving dag1 as ex11 which is confirmed using the Failover Manager cluster.

My question is why NetBackup doesn't back up from ex01 if it is the first in the preferred list

[Lowell_Palecek]

The default policy setting is to use servers with passive copies of a database first. NetBackup doesn't choose ex01 because it has active copies of the databases. If you want ex01 and ex02 to be chosen, set the database source in the policy to active copy only.

The preferred server list applies to which servers to choose for passive database copies. It does not apply to choosing active copies.

If your DAG is IP-less (no administrative access point), I am surprised you find ex11 named as the access point in the Failover Cluster Manager.

The Exchange server that NetBackup chooses to represent the DAG has nothing to do with settings in Exchange. It is chosen by an algorithm in the NetBackup Discovery Framework service (nbdisco). The chosen Exchange server is used in the following situations:

- It's where bpresolver runs during backup. Bpresolver chooses the distribution of backup jobs to the various Exchange servers. The Exchange server where NetBackup chooses to run bpresolver does not influence the servers that bpresolver chooses to run the backup.

- On a database restore, bpresolver runs on the server that NetBackup chooses for the DAG, in order to find the Exchange server that holds the active copy of the database.

- It's the server whose settings you see and set when you think you're setting the client host configuration for the DAG. For this reason, do client host configuration for the Exchange servers individually.

- It's the server that executes nblbc.exe to query the backed up database when you're browsing into a mailbox in the NetBackup admin console or BAR GUI.