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1 2 Previous Next 16 Replies Last post: Oct 14, 2007 12:36 PM by knoxvegas

Exchange P2V Problems posted: Feb 6, 2007 4:37 PM

Eric Napa

14 posts since
Dec 12, 2006

We have successfully? P2V'd our Exchange 2K Server with VMConverter 3.0. We set all Exchange services to manual as a precaution and rebooted to the CD. We used the Cold Cloning directly to ESX 3.01.

However we now have a error message that keeps coming up. It did not come up until after we check out the system and placed it in production so there is no going back. We have not had any end users complained about email at all so it does not seem to be affecting anything at this time.

We seen this message a few dozen times on Sunday and then none at all on Monday. Today there are hundreds.

Has anyone else had a EDB problem after a P2V.

http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=474&eventno=2214&source=ESE&phase=1

Event ID: 474
Source ESE
Type Error
Description Information Store (<PID>) The database page read from the file "<path to edb file>" at offset <offset> for <value> bytes failed verification due to a page checksum mismatch. The expected checksum was <checksum> and the actual checksum was <checksum>. The read operation will fail with error <error code> (<error code>). If this condition persists then please restore the database from a previous backup.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

1. Feb 6, 2007 6:55 PM

in response to: Eric Napa

Jasemccarty

3,806 posts since
Apr 5, 2005

Have you seen is MS KB?
http://ask.support.microsoft.com/kb/327334

Maybe it didn't like the fact that the disks changed.

I'm not saying to do this, but a hard repair, and then a defrag (Eseutil Utility) may fix the problem.

Either way, Exchange thinks that the database is corrupt.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

2. Feb 6, 2007 7:10 PM

in response to: Jasemccarty

mjrogers99

30 posts since
Feb 27, 2006

Depending on how many users you have it may be easier to create a new database and move them to it. That way you don't have to take the whole thing off line for a long period of time.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

3. Feb 6, 2007 7:18 PM

in response to: mjrogers99

Jasemccarty

3,806 posts since
Apr 5, 2005

I'd dare to say, that's what I'd do.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

4. Feb 7, 2007 8:36 AM

in response to: Jasemccarty

Eric Napa

14 posts since
Dec 12, 2006

I only have 120 Users so that is a great idea. I will give this a try.

I do think it is related to the Disk as well. We tried the DC that day and it refused to replicate and it was talking about Disk Signature. We turned the Physical box back on so we could do more research.

I feel that this might have been a Converter 3.0 problem as the Company I am working with has done hundreds of P2V's with Several Exchange server and have not seen this problem, they normally use Ghost. We felt this was a more complete process but it is a very early release.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

5. Feb 7, 2007 1:48 PM

in response to: Eric Napa

pangchen

2,059 posts since
Nov 15, 2004

The convert functionality within Converter is equivalent to the System Reconfiguration functionality from within P2V Assistant.

When you cold cloned, did you select the entire disk or did you resize the volume? Doing the latter resorts to file-level copying and any changes could be causing the surprises to Exchange.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

6. Feb 7, 2007 3:44 PM

in response to: pangchen

Joseph.Nguyen

20 posts since
Feb 2, 2007

I'm am having the same issue with the Exchange IS server not being able to start. I will have to test your theory by not resizing the disks.

Thanks Pangchen.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

7. Feb 7, 2007 10:24 PM

in response to: pangchen

nsargent

19 posts since
Jan 25, 2006

I work with Eric Napa, so I can answer the question. We resized the volumes. I'd like to know if cloning the entire disk is the answer. I'm sitting here in our server room finishing up the eseutil /p, eseutil /g and isinteg commands to clean up the problem... Funny part about this, we had our vendor call Microsoft and the tech said it would be about a 5 hour process for each eseutil command. The /p took 2.75 hours and the /g took 20 minutes. VMWare is awesome. I just wish there were better resources to avoid this sort of situation before it happens. The forums and the VMWare community are great but VMWare should be able to supply this kind of information, at least on applications that are widely used.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

8. Feb 7, 2007 11:43 PM

in response to: nsargent

pangchen

2,059 posts since
Nov 15, 2004

I'm only speculating that Exchange would have behaved the same way if you used any imaging tool to take a copy of the original disks and decided to overlay them on new disks with resized volumes. If you decided to swap out the priginal physical disks with new physical disks and used this method, perhaps Exchange would have complained and it isn't a P2V//virtualization issue per se.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

9. Feb 8, 2007 11:01 AM

in response to: Joseph.Nguyen

Eric Napa

14 posts since
Dec 12, 2006

We would really like to know the results of your test with no disk resizing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As Nathan said he was running the EDB Utilities on the DB, Until 4am. What he did not say it that at 1:30pm yesterday the Store totally crashed. He did get the Store Fixed but we still have missing emails, attachments and Calendars items. Over all we probably fixed 99% of the store.

I am sure these errors on Event Viewer "Background Cleanup" are related to the errors below not getting fixed.

Test Folder result: 82 error's); 0 warning's); 0 fix(es); 8360 row(s); time: 1h:14m:53s

Test Attachment result: 0 error(s); 50 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 228329 row(s); time: 0h:0m:28s

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeIS Mailbox Store
Event Category: Background Cleanup
Event ID: 1104
Date: 2/8/2007
Time: 5:43:41 AM
User: N/A
Computer: SVR-EXCH2
Description:
Error 0xfffff9bf occurred during a background cleanup on attachment 1-3AE5BBE on database "Main Storage Group\Main MailBox Store".

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

10. Feb 20, 2007 5:36 AM

in response to: Eric Napa

CGE

5 posts since
Feb 20, 2007

At our company, we're facing the same problem with the corrupted database.
We did NOT change the disk sizes.

We have only one Exchange server.
Is it a best practice to just create a new mailbox store and move all the mailboxes to the new mailbox store?
Or should we use the eseutil command to repair the database?

At this moment, we do not have backups, because Tivoli fails to backup every night beacause of the corrupt database. I guess we first should clone the VM, before adjusting stores and databases?

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

11. Feb 20, 2007 10:08 AM

in response to: Eric Napa

impensb

542 posts since
Jun 10, 2004

During all of this, were you able to get any good backups of the IS? Just curious if the errors were causing your backups to fail.

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

12. Feb 21, 2007 8:28 AM

in response to: CGE

Eric Napa

14 posts since
Dec 12, 2006

eseutil's did recover our DB but we did loose data, At that point we had no choice as we could not mount the Store. If you can create a new store and move the users do it now.

Our Backups were working at the store level (No Mailbox backups were running) before the crash, The only problem is once you run eseutil you can not restore from past backups.

Did you use the New Converter 3.0?

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

13. Feb 21, 2007 1:48 PM

in response to: Eric Napa

CGE

5 posts since
Feb 20, 2007

I'm glad our Exchange-server is still running well and that the store is mounted.
On the other hand: I'm not sure that we can mount the store after a reboot!

In this case, would it be a good idea to do the following steps? -->
1) Plug the Exchange-server off the network and make sure that no mail can be sent or received
2) Use Exmerge in the first place to export all mailboxes to a pst as part of a emergency backup
3) Shut down the Exchange server and make a clone with VMWARE
4) Start the Clone-server, mount the information store, make a new storage group and move all mailboxes from the old storage group to the new storage group.
5) Remove the old mailbox storage group, and then make sure (and HOPE :-) ) that users can access their mailboxes.

We used the New Converter indeed! If you like, I can try to find the exact version number

Re: Exchange P2V Problems

14. Feb 21, 2007 2:16 PM

in response to: CGE

Eric Napa

14 posts since
Dec 12, 2006

I would do anything I could to get a backup. PST or Store Level.

I do believe that the crash was caused by my Helpdesk person exporting and importing a user (1 gig) to a PST but with Outlook not Exmerge.

After the reboot we could not mount the store. I do think since we were already having problems it would have happened with a reboot anyway but the process was just to much on the system.

We were going to try moving the mailboxes to a new store after hours but we crashed that day so we never got a chance to see if that would have solved the corruption problem.

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