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VSS Backup Woes - 7.Oct.2008 3:52:48 PM

mwatts

Posts: 71
Joined: 26.Jan.2006
Status: offline

We run a fairly large Exchange org with around 6000 mailboxes. Our databases equal up to about 800GBs. We have a Active/Passive SCC Cluster with 16GB of RAM for all the mailboxes. Trouble is when backups are running user's outlook performance drags.

We do a full backup everynight and all though we try our very best to tweak backups so they are done by 7:00am when you have to backup 800GBs that doesn't always happen.

Users only experience slow Outlook performace when VSS is doing it's freeze and thaw of the databases to perform the backup. Once the the shadow copy is made and the actual backup starts everything is fine but the performance drop we see for the minute or so while this shadow copy is being created is enough to cause people to call in and complain.

My question is what can we do to improve our backup performance. We have 22 databases and the backup software we use (Arcserve) does a frezze/thaw of each database before it starts the backup one at a time. Is there anyway to have Arcserve do it's frezze/thaw of all the databases at once and than start the backups?

We have also though about just doing Full backups on weekends and doing Incemental backups on weekdays. At this point I am willing to try anything.

Before with Exchange 2003 we never had this issue as we used streaming backups and the backups would generally run throughout the night and into the day but user's never saw any perforamce drops due to the VSS service not being involved.

I have also tired installing all the related VSS performace hotfix that Microsoft recommends.

Any help you could give me would be greatly appericated!

Thank you