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Gooose
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎05-11-2011 01:48 AM

Exchange 2010 Backups

Good Morning,

I'm experiencing a problem when backing up Exchange 2010 which is fully virtualised utilising Database Availability Groups.

My VMware environment is ESX4.0 (Update 2) running in an HA cluster consisting of 4 servers, attached to Netapp Shared storage NFS datastores.

What appears to be happening is down to the VMware Snapshot mechanics.  I use vRanger which utilises the VMware snapshot functionality, and when the snapshot is being deleted the Virtual Machine is stunned to the extent where I lose network connectivity for approx 10 seconds.  Due to this network timeout, the Exchange 2010 Databases failover to the other Exchange server in the cluster.

Has anyone come across this issue?  I've done some investigation and apparantly ESX 4.1 (Update 1) handles snapshots a lot better?

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Rubeck
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎05-11-2011 02:32 AM

I've also seen this on ESX4 U2 and 4.1 when CBT is configured for the VM...

It seems that VMware has released a patch for 4.1, which might fix it as the description seems very related. Not that this helps you when running 4.0 😞

"if you are using a backup application that utilizes Changed Block Tracking (CBT) and the ctkEnabled option for the virtual machine is set to true, the virtual machine becomes unresponsive for up to 30 seconds when you remove snapshots of the virtual machine residing on an NFS storage"

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1035097

/Rubeck

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