As of 2007 Sp2, AD contains most attributes associated with exchange, excepting those stored in the so-called "IIS metabase". Those are included in a system-state backup.
So... you install an OS, restore the system state backup, and the only thing else you have to do is reseed the DB copy. In 25 words or less. :-P From: Sobey, Richard A [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 4:46 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Issues snapshotting virtual Exchange servers in DAG? I can't get my head round the advantages of a system state backup vs. just reinstalling the OS and then Exchange in recovery mode. Is it just a time issue or is there genuinely some data that must be restored? Personally, I've recovered mailbox servers by just reinstalling and configuring the OS and then plonking Exchange on top. Seemed to work fine (Ex 2007 standalone). (Or were you simply talking about EDB backups with 2 or fewer database copies?) From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]]<mailto:[mailto:[email protected]]> On Behalf Of Michael B. Smith Sent: 22 March 2012 18:36 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Issues snapshotting virtual Exchange servers in DAG? Unless you've got 3 copies of your data, I'd recommend doing SOME backup. Servers that are members of a DAG are slightly more complicated than just /recoverserver, but it isn't a huge deal. Personally, I just do a system-state backup from within the VM. It's much smaller than snapping the entire VM, no delays are involved, and the recovery process is pretty trivial. From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:[email protected]]<mailto:[mailto:[email protected]]> Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 1:32 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Issues snapshotting virtual Exchange servers in DAG? Oddly I can't find an article on his blog using anything obvious (to me), did find this though: http://internationalmanofawesome.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/decreasing-exchange-2010-dag-failover-sensitivity-by-increasing-cluster-timeout-values/ My next question was going to be whether it's worth doing VM level backups to start with, particularly with a DAG? AIUI so long as you have a good copy of the databases it's a "simple" matter of standing up a new server and re-installing Exchange with /recoverserver - but I don't have the experience to know if this is likely to be more pleasant than trying to use a snapshot as in our case our databases/logs are on iSCSI volumes mounted within the guest, so snapshotting the VM would just get us a bootable OS. --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist
