Imaging an Exchange server is not a good idea, and it's not supported by MS.
Have you studied the Disaster Recovery white paper?
There are replication solutions, and clustering of course, but this is very
high end stuff, and you give no indications of your scale. I can't advise
you on those, but people far more
knowledgeable than I have expressed doubts about those. They are very
expensive and very demanding.
The solution to disk failure (and to system failure) is keeping each
Exchange component on a separate RAID array in the best quality, most
redundant, most supported box you can afford.
A recovery server can get you up and running very quickly. Dialtone service
and/or /disasterrecovery restore of a full server can be very fast in
practiced hands and with disk-based backups.
From: "Brett Fernicola" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Exchange Discussions" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2007 5:18 AM
Subject: I need some advice on a good Exchange Backup - Restore Solution.
Hi,
I have been looking for a good quick easy self automated backup solution
for
small exchange shops that I have been doing consulting work for.
My goal is to find a product that can backup an Exchange Server completely
including the OS state, System State, Exchange data and all files. I want
this backup to be a complete working disk image that I could use to
restore
the server with in case of complete Hard Drive failure. I also want to be
able to start these backups while the server is still Online and running
in
windows and processing email. Then eventually schedule all this to do a
backup once a week thus not needing any admin intervention.
So far I have tried Acronis, and it works great when used booted from a
boot
cd, but running Live from windows is not always pretty. I have the latest
version and I've seen it completely lock windows. I also use bat files to
shut down (netlogin, File Replication, and Exchange) before the backup is
run. I also turn on VSS support and tell Acronis to do an entire C:
Partition image backup to a file and to save it on an external HD.
I dry run tested my backup and restore procedure by trying to restore a
server to another extra identical HD I had lying around. After I restored
the Exchange Server I tested it on, which is also an additional Domain
Controller and Global Catalog, the system did boot but it had problems.
In
my event log I saw an error that said "Active Directory was restored using
an unsorted method and in result the Netlogon Service was Stopped." So I
checked Netlogon and sure enough it was stopped and will not start on a
reboot. Now If I manually started netlogon and then ran a dcdiag
everything
seemed to check out fine. Email was working, Authentication was fine,
OWA,
and even SYSVOl replication was working smoothly. However if you reboot
this server in its restored state it will not work until Netlogon is fired
back up. So a simple bat file can fix this but should not be necessary.
So my question I pose is how do I properly backup and restore a small
Primary Domain Controller and small Exchange Server which is also an
additional domain controller + Global catalog. How good is NTBACKUP, and
what is the correct method of doing a backup and restore with a NTBACKUP
image.
Any thoughts, comments and software recommendations would be greatly
appreciated.
Brett Fernicola
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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