How to perform a Granular Recovery from Exchange 2010 (DAG) using NMM 2.3

Hi Alexander,

You have 2 options:

1.Perform RDB and then restore the MB from within the RDB

2.- Install NMM 2.4, send the backups to AFTD or DD device and then use GLR feature introduced in 2.4 where you can just browse from the backup. NMM 2.4 introduces NWFS (NetWorker File System) which is just a virtual layer in which the backup gets mounted, so nsrmmd will gather the information directly from the device and will present it to NWFS then as simple as that, you can browse the MB's within that DB.

Thank you.

Carlos.

Hi Carlos!,

Thanks a lot for your reply...

So I think I will try to update from 2.3 to 2.4 of NMM, because I think this is more friendly than recover whole Exchange database (another disk required or at least more disk space to recover the RDB), and then browe the Mailboxes.

About the NMM 2.4 and the newly and improved Networker File System, I thinks this is a great point for this situation, suc as we have AFTD disk devices and only the monthy backups are done to Tape.

If we need to recover a mailbox from an old backup than is not present in AFTD devices, is possible to get the data from Tape?.

Once again, thanks a lot for your suggestions.

Kind regards,

Alexander

Hi Alexander,

A couple of considerations:

Requirements for NMM 2.4 and Exchange 2010:

NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications (NMM) supports Microsoft Exchange Server

2010 Service Pack 1, Rollup 6 or later.

NMM 2.4 provides support for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1, Rollup 6 on:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition (x64)
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition (x64)

NMM 2.4 provides Exchange Server 2010 backup and recovery support in the following:

• Data Availability Group environment — Exchange 2010 has introduced Data Availability Group (DAG) for high availability of Exchange databases:

• Each Exchange database can be replicated to multiple Exchange Servers, the maximum being 16 copies.
• For direct file access (DFA) backups, each client resource can contain a maximum of 10 mailbox databases. For example, a server containing 20 databases would require two client resources containing 10 databases each. The NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications Release 2.4 Administration Guide provides information about DFA.

• Out of multiple copies of a database, only one copy of the database is active at a time, the remaining copies are passive.
• Back up of active databases, passive databases, or both can be performed.
• Back up of databases in DAG environment can be restored only to active database copies.

Also, I believe that NMM 2.4 is not backwards compatible with previous versions so, if you have a backup with NMM 2.3 I don't think you would be able to restore with NMM 2.4, I'll double check.

Also if you need to restore from tape then GLR option will not be available, as those are not GLR compatible savesets. In that case I would recommend you to perform RDB restore and then from within the RDB browse and restore the MB you need.

Thank you.

Carlos.

Hi Carlos,

Thanks a lot for your answer!

We will have a deep review about the enviroment, such as the enviroment is like 2 DAG (01 & 02) and in each DAG there are 4 MailBox Servers, with at least 2 Exchange DB's.

So I think, we can give one disk / volume to one of the passive nodes in each Dag, for the RDB recovery process. Then we can do an RDB recovery from a MB DB inside the same DAG, isn't it?.

I mean, DAG01 with MB01,MB02, MB03 and MB04; on the other hand DAG02 with MB05,MB06,MB07 and MB08. If we need to recover a Mailbox from one user that resides on DAG01 inside the MB02 DB, we can restore with RDB option recovery process the DB from MB02 to MB04 such is in the same DAG.... then we only need one disk over SAN to the Exchange server node that we prefer, not to give a lot of disks (8, one per MB server) to each MB server in order to have enough space to recovery whole Database on the MB server destination.

I'll keep you updated about this as soon as we check and review the requirements and the available options.

Regards,

Alexander

Hi Carlos,

Here again

Ok, let's try to explain the situation...

Now I'm involved into a Recovery DB (whole), but I've found a mistake into my configuration... or something like this...

As a DAG enviroment, I've created 2 DAG resources, like dag.domain.com and dag2.domain.com, one for each Exchange DAG enviroment, as peer configurations guides and many posts I have found that the Data/Indexes are saved to these client resources, not to the Exchange Clients directly, the main thing here is that we have three different groups: Daily, Weekly and Monthly groups, so these groups have different browse and retention time like: Week, Month and Year... the main problem here is that I've created the dag clients with a browse and retention like week (Daily), so the groups scheduled for week and month only retain the data one week ;(

How can I solve this?, I mean: Is possible to create another 4 dag clients resources and assing then to each group?, I know that is a must not to schedule any backup against these resources, but I have not read about if is possible to have it inside each group, so I can have the browse and retention as I need.

Daily: MB01, MB02, MB05, MB06 (scheduled and with Week/Week) + dag, dag2 (not scheduled) and Week /Week

Weekly: MB01, MB02, MB05, MB06 (scheduled and with Month/Month) + dag, dag2 (not scheduled) and Month/Month

Monthly: MB01, MB02, MB05, MB06 (scheduled and with Year/Year) + dag, dag2 (not scheduled) and Year/Year

Please, let me know your opinion about this trouble.

Regards,

Alexander

Hi Carlos!,

Sure I have been speaking with one of your collegues and gives me the same document

I'll try to keep updaed about this...

Regards,

Alexander

We use exchange 2006 and the nmm takes a long time to load and we are doing database recovery.

Should we do a granular recovery instead? would that need any other software installed?