Storage Foundation 8.0 Quick Recovery Solutions Guide for Microsoft Exchange - Windows
- Introducing Quick Recovery for Microsoft Exchange
- Planning a Quick Recovery snapshot solution for Exchange
- System requirements
- Methods of implementing Quick Recovery snapshots
- Recommendations and best practices
- Configuring Exchange for Quick Recovery snapshots
- Implementing Exchange snapshot sets with the configuration wizard
- About the Quick Recovery Configuration Wizard
- Scheduling Exchange snapshot sets
- Scheduling or creating an individual snapshot set for Exchange
- Maintaining or troubleshooting snapshots
- Recovering Exchange mailbox databases
- Recovering after hardware failure
- About recovery after hardware failure
- Scenario I: Database and transaction logs volumes are missing
- Scenario II: Database volumes missing, transaction logs are available
- Refreshing the snapshot set on the current disks
- Moving the production volumes to different disks and refreshing the snapshot set
- Vxsnap utility command line reference for Exchange
About the VSS Snapshot and Snapback wizards and the vxsnap utility
If you need to create an individual one-time snapshot, you can do so either from the command line, using the vxsnap command line utility, or from the VEA console using the VSS Snapshot and Snapback wizards.
You must prepare the mirror for the snapshot manually, using the Prepare command. In addition, you cannot use the Snapshot wizard or command line to schedule periodic refreshing of the snapshot. Instead you manually reattach the mirror, allowing it to resynchronize, and then create a snapshot again from the resynchronized mirror.
Therefore, these methods are best suited for a one-time special-purpose snapshot. If you need to maintain a snapshot set for future use, you should instead set up a snapshot schedule using the VSS Exchange Snapshot Scheduler Wizard or the Quick Recovery Configuration Wizard.
If replication is enabled for an Exchange 2010 database in a DAG, these SFW snapshot methods can also be used to create a snapshot of the passive copy of an Exchange 2010 database.
The following table shows the corresponding vxsnap commands for the VSS wizards.
Table: Actions of VSS wizard and vxsnap command
Action | VSS wizard | vxsnap command |
---|---|---|
Creates a set consisting of snapshots of all the volumes in the specified Exchange database. | VSS Snapshot | create |
Reattaches and resynchronizes a snapshot set to the production database volumes. | VSS Snapback | reattach |
Note:
The vxsnap commands must be invoked on a local system.