Every time I have had to perform a full system restore of a failed server, it has always been a cumbersome process aligned with multiple challenges. I have been working with Backup Exec for over 8 years now back when it was owned by a company named Veritas. It was deemed at the time, the best course of action would be to recover the server through Backup Exec as this would ensure things such as the digital certificate and Exchange Web service URL addresses would all be restored back to their original state.
As a result we had two methods for recovering this Exchange 2010 SP3 server bringing it back online: We did have a full backup of the Exchange 2010 server through Backup Exec 2010 R3 SP3 which was taken on the weekend of both the system volume and system state.
The database/log volume was assumed to be fine and the plan was to simply re-attach the database/log files after the system volume containing Windows and Exchange server was restored. Note: This server only had two volumes however additional volumes can exist in the event additional databases are required.Īs the system volume was corrupt and no longer booting, this needed to either rebuilt or restored from backup. Remember Exchange 2010 has a 90% disk I/O reduction over Exchange 2003. Volume 2 (Logs + Database) which contain the Exchange 2010 database and log filesĭue to the changes in Disk I/O it is no longer a requirement to separate transaction logs from the Exchange database as I/O is no longer an issue.Volume 1 (SYSTEM) consists of Operating System, Page File and Exchange System Files.This server was one I setup a couple of years back and as a result it followed my standard multi-role Exchange server build which consists of two or more NTFS volumes.
The Exchange 2010 SP3 server was running on top of a VMware vSphere 5.1 clustered environment hosted on shared storage. We were not able to access Windows in anyway even by booting into safe mode and had no indication as to why the failure occurred as we could not access the server event logs. The server server would not boot and was simply blue screening. Yesterday I responded to an emergency callout to a customer with 800 users running a single Exchange 2010 SP3 UR3 multi role server running on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.