Slowww Mailbox Backups suggestions anyone ? 4

[pctekk]

question,
we are backing up our Exchange 2000 email with Veritas Backup Exec and the Exchange add-on at the mailbox level. According to Veritas support, there is really no good way to speed up the process since every email has to be read in order to back them up at this level.

Using HP Ultrium 2 autoloader attached to the email server. Takes approximately 7 hours to back up 16 GB of email. It takes another 6 hours to backup the entire rest of the network, which is approximately 180GB.

According to Veritas, the hardware isn't the problem, it's just the nature of Exchange. I hate to only backup the entire information store and not have the option of restoring individual mailboxes. Has anyone else in this boat come up with a faster solution?

More stats:
-Servers are on Gig network cards and all on the same 3COM 4900 Gigabit switch. The ultrium is connected to the Exchange Server and Backup Exec 9.1 is installed on Exchange server as well. Ultrium drive is brand new and has latest firmware, etc.

-I'm using OFO, but exchange server is too busy and can't get the minimum quiet time, so OFO doesn't start on exchange for the C and E drive backups (excluding the exchsrvr folder, stores, and mailboxes). I have a single job for all servers including the email as Veritas says even if OFO is selected, BE won't do OFO on the stores, public folders, and mailboxes. I have run the jobs separately, and combined, and have the same time results.

-Backup jobs are in the evening, off hours. Start after 5pm and complete before 8am. I've tried different times to see if it makes a difference. I also have the exchange part of it at the end of the backup so it doesn't interfere with the database maintenance in exchange.

-I'm only backing up selected mailboxes I believe, but will
confirm if any others.

-BE version 9.1 Rev 4691

-Only fail is for the mailboxes it can't access because they are disabled accounts.

-Last offline defrag has been a while ago, but the online defrag runs successfully.

-Symantec Mail Security of Exchange and Symantec Corp Edition are both running on exchange and configured as dictated in their support articles. Also running GFI Mail Essentials on exchange. This is probably slowing down the process some.

-Brand new Ultrium drive with brand new tapes.
It has been rebooted several times during the past month since I've had the ultrium drive.

-switch has been rebooted at least once in the past month.

-Everything is running full duplex. Not sure about the nic drivers, I'll check that.

 

[justin2000]

Mailbox backup speed has just about nothing to do with hardware, unless other things are backing up slowly as well.

Veritas is right when they say what they say.

You try the same with CA or Legato or anything else that can do mailbox backups and u will get the same results.

The only thing that could really speed up your backups is to disable exchange anti virus whilst the backup is happening, and then turn it on at the end.


OFO is not used for exchange mailboxes or exchange IS so this is nothing.

defrag's to the IS won;t make any difference at all either.

why don;t u try an exmerge from the BE server, see how long this take to run, it will probably be similar to the backup of the mailboxes.

 

[pctekk]

will do
thanks !!!

 

[yizhar]

HI.

I get similar results on several small business Exchange 2003 servers that I manage.
I agree with "Justin2000" and Veritas that this is more an Exchange issue then BE.

The performance could be related to the Exchange server hardware - not the tape device but general hardware: CPU, Disks and controllers, RAM, etc...

You can use the "Performance" administrative tool and also the simple "Task Manager" to track the server hardware during the backup process and look for bottle neck.

Make a test with the Mail anti virus disabled just to check the impact of the AV software on the backup process.
Make sure that you have the very latest version of SMSMSE - ask Symantec phone support to provide that.
Same for GFI.

Does GFI scan exising email messages or only incoming new mail (mail relay)?
I think that if you use 2 AV products to scan Exchange at the same time you can degrade performance and cause other issues, unless one of them is *ONLY* scanning the incoming new mail from Internet.

Not related to the performance issue, but I think that you can better disable OFO on the Exchange server. It seems to me that this feature is not usefull for Exchange and can cause problems - what do you think?

Another option that you have is to schedule the Brick level backup for only once a week. (You can try to do incremental brick level daily in addition - I did not try this myself).

-BE version 9.1 Rev 4691
Did you install SP1 for BE9.1?

Bye

Yizhar


Yizhar Hurwitz

http://teachers.sivan.co.il/yizhar

 

[Rovent]

I'm not entirely positive, but i think BE 9.x might be worse than 8.6 in backing up mailboxes. I had 8.6 on a dual PIII-500, and got a through-put of about 45 Mb/min. We upgraded to 9.0, then to 9.1, and we got about .5 Mb/min, on a good day. We migrated to a quad PIV-1.7, and now we're at a screaming 2 Mb/min, which only takes us about 5 days to complete.

Our flat file backups, though, run at about 500 Mb/min. My weekly fulls take about 6 hours.

 

[justin2000]

I have friends who have installed Hotfix 33 and it has made some difference to backup speed - granted they were already getting any where between 40-60mb/min, they say that things have been faster since applying the hotfix.

Also, 8.6 and 9.x backup in a total different way.

8.6 dragged the data across from the remote server.
9.x all the processing is done on the remote server and then pushed across to be backed up by the media server.