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BP1013 Best Practices for Enhancing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Data Protection and Availability ii
Table of Contents
1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.1 Purpose and scope ................................................................................................................................... 5
1.2 Target audience ......................................................................................................................................... 5
1.3 Key benefits of snapshots for applications ........................................................................................... 5
1.4 Terminology ............................................................................................................................................... 6
2 Exchange Server data protection options and challenges ......................................................................... 7
2.1 Exchange store elements ........................................................................................................................ 8
2.2 Exchange 2010 database protection options ...................................................................................... 9
3 Auto-Snapshot Manager and Exchange protection .................................................................................. 11
3.1 ASM/ME integration with Windows platform and VSS Service ........................................................ 11
4 Test topology and architecture .................................................................................................................... 14
4.1 Functional system design ...................................................................................................................... 14
4.2 Physical system configuration ............................................................................................................... 15
4.3 Storage layout .......................................................................................................................................... 16
5 Test workload .................................................................................................................................................. 18
5.1 Microsoft Load Generator considerations .......................................................................................... 18
6 Testing the impact of Smart Copy snapshots ............................................................................................ 20
6.1 Time taken results and analysis .............................................................................................................21
6.2 Host resources impact ........................................................................................................................... 22
6.3 Optional ASM/ME functionalities: checksum and verification ........................................................ 24
7 Recovery scenarios ......................................................................................................................................... 27
7.1 Backup mechanisms applied to Exchange recovery ........................................................................ 27
7.2 Testing in-place full restore .................................................................................................................. 29
7.2.1 Considerations on Smart Copy in-place restore ........................................................................31
7.3 Testing Brick level recovery ................................................................................................................... 32
7.4 Restore the high availability level in a DAG ........................................................................................ 33
7.4.1 Testing the impact of DAG seeding over the network ............................................................. 33
7.4.2 Testing DAG seeding supported by the SAN .............................................................................. 37
7.4.3 Seeding operations details ............................................................................................................. 42
8 Best practice recommendations .................................................................................................................. 44
Appendix A Test configuration details .......................................................................................................... 48
A.1 Hardware configuration ......................................................................................................................... 48