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#166919 - 2006-09-06 12:48 AM OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
NTDOC Administrator Offline
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Was wondering how other shops manage their Exchange 2003 enviorements to mitigate potential failures.

Redundant RAID cards?
Clustering?
Snapshot mirroring?
Daily backup only?
Incremental hourly snapshots ?
etc...

I currenly only have one Exchange Server and it had a RAID failure that I had to restore from tape to get back up and running. Due to log corruption I lost 1/2 a day of mail. Looking to try and prevent that from happening again in the future or at least being able to be back up and running much faster if possible so looking to see what other shops are doing.
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#166920 - 2006-09-06 01:12 AM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
StarwarsKid Offline
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I moved from tape backups to backup-to-disk via 1gb ethernet. I have an exchange DB of 21GB which backs up in 15 minutes with verification. (Full Online Exchange DB backup. Symantec BE10d)

My exchange server is a Dell PowerEdge 2850, Raid5, reduntant power/internal fans, UPS and generator backup.

You can also do the incremental backups which will just backup the transaction logs (careful of circular logging if you do this). That would be a quicker backup. Then a full backup would bring the log file data into your main database(s).
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#166921 - 2006-09-06 01:57 AM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
Gargoyle Offline
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And we have a clustered enviroment, with the data stores on a SAN, which has 15 minute snapshots to a nearstore.
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#166922 - 2006-09-06 02:35 AM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
NTDOC Administrator Offline
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So anyone actually using this? Or thinking about using it?

http://www.doubletake.com/
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#166923 - 2006-09-06 02:56 AM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
Gargoyle Offline
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We have used doubletake in the past for another application, and the sysadmin in charge of that particular application was not very happy with the results. I can ask him tomorrow for further elaboration.
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#166924 - 2006-09-06 01:24 PM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
masken Offline
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I do both offline and online backups. First a regular NTbackup to another server via Gigabit ethernet, then regular tape backup. An alternative on the online backup if you've got too much data to transfer is a simple external hdd.
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#166925 - 2006-09-07 12:44 AM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
NTDOC Administrator Offline
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Quote:

First a regular NTbackup



Hmmmm... have you looked at the log or tried a restore from that method? According to Microsoft the Shadow Copy Service does not operate properly to backup Exchange 2003 out of the box and was left up to 3rd party vendors to support.
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#166926 - 2006-09-07 06:56 AM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
Lonkero Administrator Offline
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doc, give us a linky...
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#166927 - 2006-09-07 10:59 AM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
NTDOC Administrator Offline
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TechNet Support WebCast: Volume Shadow Copy for Exchange Server 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842066/

If you download the PowerPoint show and look at slide 14 it says that NTBackup does not use VSS to backup Exchange

Well I've not seen applications like databases backup correctly without 3rd party or VSS so was curious if / how NTBackup was working.

I've not tried it myself but have had other systems not backup properly with NTBackup alone.


PowerPoint download:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/5/f/05fd8f6e-35c8-425f-ba9d-6941b4b60850/wc051904.exe
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#166928 - 2006-09-08 02:05 PM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
masken Offline
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I know a huge amount of installations (especially small business 2003 servers) that uses ntbackup to backup and restore Exchange stores, and there haven't been any problems so far...
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#166929 - 2006-09-08 07:48 PM Re: OT: - Exchange 2003 redundancy
NTDOC Administrator Offline
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Just curious since this is a Microsoft presentation. Wonder what method it is using to properly backup Exchange if it is not using VSS.

Or - Perhaps this article was pre release 2003 or pre-SP1 AND now NTBackup is supported???

Edited by NTDOC (2006-09-08 07:49 PM)
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