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Storage needed for NMM for Exchange on VM?
Greetings
I'm contemplating the following scenario and I'm hoping that someone can enlighten me on some details about the VSS snaps:
Exchange 2007 running on Windows 2008 sp2
Networker Server running 7.5.2
NMM to backup Exchange
OS is on C:, Exchange DB is on E:, transaction logs are on F:
All drives are VMFS
Would use the Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider
So I get how the basic backup process works...NMM is the VSS Requestor, during a backup it gets the Exchange VSS Writer to quiesces the DB and uses the MS Software Shadow Copy Provider to create a copy-on-write snapshot.
Question(s): Where do these snapshots exist? How does one go about tracking how much space they consume? Can they be forced to use a different or dedicated drive?
Any insight about where the snapshots live and how to track them would be appreciated. I understand how and where they get mounted when a restore is being done, but I'm unclear on where the actual space is being used up....If we go this route I want to make sure that we are prepared for the space requirements.
thanks in advance...
--brerrabbit
MikeToo1
38 Posts
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September 15th, 2010 14:00
Question(s): Where do these snapshots exist? How does one go about tracking how much space they consume? Can they be forced to use a different or dedicated drive?
Because we call VSS, the more accurate answers would be from Microsoft. If you check the properties for each drive you can see the space reserved for system restore. You are able to configure the number of snap copies through MS tools. But NMM has a Snap retention by default of 0. It is not recommended to change this value.
36115_carloscor
217 Posts
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September 16th, 2010 00:00
Hi Brerrabit,
Please see below the answers to your questions:
Question(s): Where do these snapshots exist? How does one go about tracking how much space they consume? Can they be forced to use a different or dedicated drive?
Any insight about where the snapshots live and how to track them would be appreciated. I understand how and where they get mounted when a restore is being done, but I'm unclear on where the actual space is being used up....If we go this route I want to make sure that we are prepared for the space requirements.
The snapshot for the Exchange backup are mounted in the path you specify in the client configuration (in NMC) in the variable: NSR_ALT_PATH, so if you want to use a dedicated drive you just need to change the path for that variable.
Once snapshot is mounted you can check the space of it in the Windows Explorer. And you cn also use the following commands to see the status of the snapshot creation:
vssadmin list shadows
vssadmin list shadowstorage
Please let me know if you need any further information or if this answered your question.
Thank you.
Best regards,
Carlos.