Clean backup of Exchange mailbox VHD
Running Exchange in a HA virtual environment. Two Host OS boxes, each box has a Hyper-V instance of Hub, CAS and Mailbox. Mailbox databases are setup on a DAG on a separate SAN device. BackupExec 2010 R3 (with all the required agents) works with Hub and CAS just fine, but fails for the Mailbox VHD. (I have checked the option NOT to shutdown the VHD, as I have four mailbox databases in the DAG, and two are active via each mailbox server for balancing load.) Symantec says I must manually shutdown the mailbox VHD for backup. I think there are other options out there. Are there?
Busbar
I don't know why you need to shutdown the VHD, but keep in mind this will not provide Exchange level backup.
ASKER
The Exchange databases themselves are backing up fine. It is the VHD image of the Exchange mailbox server itself I want to backup, without requiring that the image be shutdown. (In BackupExec, I drill down at Host OS system, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Machines, then select all three (HUB, CAS and MAILBOX)). Hmmm. Wait a second, the HUB and CAS show only a C: drive, and the MAILBOX shows an E: drive (where it sees the SAN image of the database and log files). But I cannot exclude that drive from the backup, "it must be part of the group" the error says.
so you want to backup the OS drive not the DB but you cannot see the C Drive, am I following correctly.
ASKER
I can see the C: drive, but I cannot exclude it if I backup through the Host OS to capture just the VHD. I can drill down to the virtual server itself to grab the C: drive that way, but I'm sure its not as clean as getting just the VHD file.
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ASKER
Again, the trouble is when I drill down through the selection process, touching the Host machine, then down to the Microsoft Hyper-V, then Virtual Machines folders, and finally the Exchange1 machine itself, I see both a C: and E: drive, and they are not individually selectable. ("Not selectable for backup. This item cannot be individually selected. It must be selected as part of a group." is what the warning messages says.) I can only select the Exchange1 VM itself, not Drive C:.