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Exchange VM with 3 .vhd's WHY?

I'm a temp admin at a network that, was built recently but never finished,(Backups were never set up) by someone who no longer works with this organization.
While looking at the set up - a Hyper-V VM host with 7 VM's I noticedf that the Exchange VM called EX1 has multiple .VHD's attached.
IDE Controller 1> Hard Drive 1 > MX1.vhd = 52 GB
IDE Controller 1> Hard Drive 2 > MX2.vhd = 104 GB

IDE Controller 2> DVD
IDE Controller 2> Hard Drive > MX3.vhd = 104 GB

Can you tell from this description why the builder built the system this way. When I do a Windows Server Backup from within the VM which is Server 2008 R2/Exchange 2010.
The backup amounts to ~85GB.

Thank you,
Tim

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

LLMorrisson

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

The original system builder has decided to create the virtual machine with three physical disks.

Hard Drive 1 > MX1.vhd = 52 GB
Hard Drive 2 > MX2.vhd = 104 GB
Hard Drive 3 > MX3.vhd = 104 GB

Only the original builder can explain why he built is this way, I can only assume, you'll get a better idea from within the OS, and have a look at the Drive letters C:, D:, E:. (if they are labelled like this).

At a guest:-

Hard Drive 1: Maybe the OS installed on this drive.

Hard Drive 2 & Hard Drive 3 could be mirrors with Exchange installed on these this RAID mirror.

or, he's installed a Malboxes on hard drive 2 and hard drive 3.

You'll have to check in the OS, and give us some mroe details.

You should see inside the OS, three drives maybe of these approx sizes?

As for you backup, total disk space in used is approx 85GB, but that could also be compressed.

Neil Russell

Like LLMorrisson said, a perfectly reasonable setup for exchange. I would expect to find OS on one drive, Exchange DB on another and LOG files on another in almost ALL new exchange setups and therefore nothing unusual about it at all.

x7c00

ASKER

Thank you. That answered a lot of questions. I thought it was some kind of CSV setup. I never made the connection. The reason I asked is the backup problem. I have to get an economical backup solution installed quickly. I'm trying something called Hyperoo. It's a prety good, scheduled, backup solution for running VM's. The problem is (contained in your solution) that the EX VM contains at least one 100GB drive that contained a Windows Server Backup only of 85 GB. A second 100GB drive that is divided into 2 that contains E:\ "Data" and F: "Logs" This is causing the backup to take a long time.
Thanks for clearing that up for me.