Backup of Virtual Exchange 2007 SP2 Server on iSCSI SAN brings clients to a crawl.
Windows 2008 64-bit w/ SP2
Exchange Server 2007 w/ SP2 w/ 16GB RAM
AVG 9.0 excluding all Exchange and Computer Associates directories from realtime scan
1Gbps IPv4 NIC
c: 49.9GB w/ 21.6GB free
e: (data store) 249GB with 17.5GB free
l: (logs) 49.9GB with 49.4GB free (circular logging)
All drives are VMDKs, no direct iSCSI connection from Exchange box.
Intel Xeon E5450 3.00 GHz (2 procc)
Hosted on VMware ESX 4.0.0, 236512
Brightstor Arcserve 12.5
Exchange Agent
On physical server
iSCSI is Left Hand Networks NSM2120 with 12 450GB SAS drives in RAID5
This Exchange server used to be on Fiber Channel, and using the CA Exchange Agent worked just fine. We migrated to the Left Hand iSCSI box and our nightly backups immediately began to slow our users down. The second backups started, fire fighters and police offers using the system would call in to complain that their Outlook clients became "locked up."
How can we effectively backup this server?
March 30th, 2010 9:06pm