Troubleshooting VMware backups and restores of Exchange Server
Note the following when you perform a VMware backup that protects an application:
One Application State Capture job is created per VM, regardless of which applications are selected in policy.
The ASC job can fail if the VMware disk layout has changed since the last discovery. In this situation, you must force NetBackup to rediscover virtual machines by lowering the value of the option. See the NetBackup for VMware Administrator's Guide.
If the ASC job fails, the VMware snapshot or backup continues. Application-specific data cannot be restored.
Failure results in the discovery job or parent job exiting with status 1.
ASC messages are filtered to the ASC job details.
If you enable recovery for a particular application but that application does not exist on the VM, the ASC job returns Status 0.
Details on the ASC job can be found in the Activity monitor job details.
If neither the Veritas VSS provider nor the VMware VSS Provider is installed at the time of backup, the Exchange databases are not quiescent. In this case, the recovery of an Exchange database after it is restored may require manual steps using the Exchange ESEUTIL utility.
bpfis is executed and simulates a VSS snapshot backup. This simulation is required to gain logical information of the application.
If you do not include the volume where Exchange is installed in a VMware backup, granular browse operations fail.
If you perform a VMware backup with Exchange protection, ensure that you include the volume where the Exchange server is installed. For example, if NetBackup is installed on
F:\and the Exchange server is installed onC:\, includeC:\in the backup.
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