Exchange aware backup does not delete transaction logs
A normal Exchange-aware backup should remove all of the transaction logs (the 1mb log files) after each successful backup.
We started getting messages about drive space on our Exchange server was less than 2% free. When I started to investigate, I noticed hundreds of gigabytes in exchange transaction logs dated around the time we moved exclusively to vmProtect (from Symantec BackupExec).
So even though vmProtect 8 claims it is "exchange aware"... it does not seem to be backing up exchange properly as the transaction logs should be cleared between backups.
I setup ntbackup last night and it ran from 1 AM to 6 AM and it being basic exchange aware, today I now have 286 GB free space on our server thanks to it correctly clearing out transaction logs after its successful backup.
So as a best practice I will use vmProtect to keep imaging this VM, and that runs earlier in the day, but I will also keep a nightly job of ntbackup (setup as described here: http://www.trainsignal.com/blog/backup-exchange-server-2007 ) to keep actual backup of the exchange databases to another network appliance.
Well looking at my recovery points for the mail server there are only 2!
2/20/2013 18:16 270.2 GB
9/11/2012 21:05 92.7 GB
The transaction logs were all dated sometime in September (the 12th sounds about right) all the way up to 2/20 when I instituted ntbackup. So this looks like between 9/11 and 2/20 vmProtect never even backed up.
I know the backup last night failed. It fails a lot. I did update ESX 4.1 to build 988178. I do have to update vmware tools on all my machine though. Sadly for Windows servers that requires a reboot. That's a little tricky to do on a production system. I don't know what software programmers are thinking of requiring reboots. They should just pop out and push in new drivers on the fly, like a linux box. Anyway that's a rant for another time...
Here is last night's detailed message regarding the task failing. The night prior to that the job was just "frozen"... no progress would ever be made. I have another thread on frozen tasks because its not particular to exchange. So lets keep this thread about this exchange job and my other thread about what causes frozen tasks.
Task 'MAIL' failed: 'Failed to create a backup.
Additional info:
--------------------
Error code: 3
Module: 435
LineInfo: 555b5abba09501ce
Fields:
Message: Failed to create a backup.
--------------------
Error code: 32786
Module: 114
LineInfo: 28314c961de7d32e
Fields:
Message: Failed to prepare for backing up.
--------------------
Error code: 353
Module: 149
LineInfo: a71592046cb2c5f6
Fields:
Message: Failed to back up the group.
--------------------
Error code: 2
Module: 218
LineInfo: 338a407ad20e0987
Fields:
Message: Error occurred while running the backup and recovery engine.
--------------------
Error code: 368
Module: 149
LineInfo: 4db9605401c15283
Fields:
Message: Failed to prepare for the Microsoft Exchange database validation.
--------------------
Error code: 358
Module: 149
LineInfo: 8e1d384601b2ab4b
Fields:
Message: VSS metadata is missing or corrupt.
--------------------
Error code: 13
Module: 4
LineInfo: 86137b9d60c180c7
Fields:
Message: The file is corrupted.
--------------------'.
Hi KJSTech,
Concerning the Exchange-aware task failure - please check my comment from the other thread: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/40208#comment-126327 (article http://kb.acronis.com/content/31347 ).
This failure basically explains why there were no logs truncation. Note that VMware tools is one of the crucial parts of Exchange-aware backup process, i.e. they must be up to date and trigger VSS inside the VM properly to make things work properly.
Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager