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Dear Exchange Pros.
We made a full restore of our Exchange Server 2013 virtual machine to be sure that restore works before we install Cumulative Update 23. Restore of complete VM took 20 hours !
The System Disk C: is 30GB of data, the Mailbox Database on Disk D: is 600GB of Data and the archive Disk on Disk E: is 220 GB, so all together is almost 1 TB of Data that has to be restored in restore process.
How can we speed up that process the best way?
I know, it is possible to move the databases to another place but whats best practice here ?
When we move the databases to an other system / storage, how will this complicate the backup / restore process ?
Thank you very much for help.
So taking snapshots of Exchange isn't supported :)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/plan-and-deploy/virtualization?view=exchserver-2019
What is supported is restoring the Exchange Data from an Exchange aware backup to new server using the recoverserver switch
That should cut down on the actual restore time in that sense.
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@IT Guy
Hi,
Agree with Andy.
Did you restored the server by using snapshots?It is not supported.
Instead,you should restore the server from a backup or using Setup /m:RecoverServer.
Here is a document for your reference:Backup, restore, and disaster recovery
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Hello
Thank you for your feedback.
The server (Exchange 2013) is am vm running on Hyper-v, we make backup with VmWare Software.
The complete VM with Exchange 2013, mailbox database and archive database is between 950GB and 1 TB.
We tested this restore to be sure that we can go back if installation of cumulative update 23 will go wrong. We never had to restore an Exchange Server before so we wanted to test that before we start with the CU update.
When you say "Instead,you should restore the server from a backup or using Setup /m:RecoverServer."...that means, restore the whole VM with VmWare is NOT ok ???
Thank you for your time and effort to help me.
@IT Guy
Hi,
Sorry my post might have been quite confusing.
Please let me clearify.
According to the document:Exchange 2013 virtualization
so using snapshots is not supported.
The "backup" I mentioned is the windows server backup,which is the official tool for exchange backup.
You can use it to restore the server if you have a full backup of your server.
Correct, the supported method is to bring up a new server using the recoverserver switch and then restore the Exchange Database to that using Exchange Aware backup software.
One reason using a Database availability group is so highly recommended is that you wont need to restore from backup if a server is lost.
You just restore the member server and replicate the databases to the restored server from the good ones. No downtime, no 20 hour restore :)
@IT Guy
Hi,
Just checking in to see if above information was helpful. Please let us know if you would like further assistance.
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