Proper Backup of Exchange Cluster

I have two PE 2950s running 2003 Svr Ent SP1 in a cluster (named 'mailnode1' and 'mailnode2') that are directly connected to a Dell EMC AX150 DP SAN. I'm also running Exchange 2003 Ent SP2 (named 'mail') on the cluster. The drives on the active node look like this: C: OS Partition D: CD Drive E: Exchange Database/Logs (SAN) Q: Quorum (SAN) I'm running the backups on a remote server (Backup Exec 10d) with the exchange agent. I'm also using a Dell PowerVault 122T LTO-2 Autoloader. I have the drive partitioned off for multiple backup jobs during the night. I would like to backup the mailboxes individually, but that seems to take forever. I'm currently seeing some really slow backup times (14 hours for 80GB doing mailboxes, system state, services state, etc) on the weekends. What backup plan would give me the best performance and recovery? Are there any other suggestions? Thanks, Nick

Message Edited by acoustix on 05-30-2007 01:06 PM

Responses(2)

acoustix

5 Posts

0

May 30th, 2007 17:00

I have two gigabit links to the switch (I'm using link aggregation) for each server so I should have plenty of bandwidth. I do run other file backups on the backup exec server and they run much faster than the remote backups. Nick

DD

DELL-Dennis

101 Posts

0

May 30th, 2007 17:00

What kind of network connection do you have between your backup server and the production servers?

The cluster and the backup server back up via the network, so if you're running into a high network utilization (either because of a 100Mbit nic connection, or just a lot of traffic on the existing link), the reason your backups are slow may be due to the network bandwidth available from the cluster to the backup server.

One way to test this is to perform a backup of data that's local on the backup server and see if that's going any faster.

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