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question about setting up exchange db client to backup all passive DBs.

  • 14 April 2021
  • 6 replies
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We have four Exchange servers. Each DB has a passive and active copy with them being on different servers. We installed the media agent and a backup disk on the exchange db server. Usually i know what DBs are passive on each server so i setup a subclient on each one so the back up will run from the passive disk directly over the SAN to the backup disk without using the network. However sometime exchange admins will do patching late at night and the DBs will failover and they wont fail them back til later. when this happens the db backups are much slower. I want to avoid this by configuring each subclient to only backup the passive DBs that are on the same server as the media agent/backup disk. my goal is to never run backups over the network even when DBs are failed over to other servers. is this possible? 

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Best answer by gibby101 14 April 2021, 19:03

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Can I know the exchange version running on these servers? Did you configure them as DAG?

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Exchange 2013. yes they are configured as dag.

 

Userlevel 4
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We can always backup from Passive or Active copies, using the Serve selection settings shown below. But we don’t have a built-in way to detect how storage is configured vs network, etc.

We do have workflow support, which can be setup to detect things like your looking for but would require building scripts and tying them into the workflow support. This is something our PS could help with or maybe others in the community but not something I’ve worked with.

 

 

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I believe you configured the exchange backup in wrong way, in Commvault you can create DAG client to backup your DAG Exchange installation,  and after that and  as Jason said, Commvault can pickup the passive DBcopy for backup operations. 

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Thanks everyone. I do have a number of  sub clients setup under the dag client. They are set to back the passive copy, and active if passive not avaliable. One for each media agent which has a back up disk directly attached to the exchange server. Each subclient uses the same storage policy. Alll the media agents were added to the storage policy. Also in the sub client properties under storage device and data paths, i chose the preferred path for each sub client, overriding the default path chosen in the storage policy. In the storage policy in data path configuration, the option ‘use alternative paths’ is chosen in case the main disk is out of space. I wonder if I remove the preferred data path chosen in the subclient, and then in the storage policy under data path configuration, i choose preferred path, then each subclient will use the correct (LAN-free) path for each passive database i selected under each subclient..

Userlevel 7
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@gibby101 , following up to see if this was resolved or still an issue.  Not certain based on your last reply :nerd:

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