So, I've gotten sucked in by VMWare's Data Production appliance- So far, it's been a great way to backup VM's in my lab and production environments, however it was lacking for exchange. I could backup the VM itself, but the log files wouldn't commit.
In the last few days, I've found a way around that too, even to the point of successfully restoring exchange DBs to exchange 2007! The secret is in the PITA way that scripts are handled inside of the VM during backups. After digging through multiple posts, I finally came up with a working set of scripts for clearing exchange logs during backups.
You'll find on VMWare's site two posts, one that details the location of backup scripts inside the VM ( http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1006671 ), and another that details using diskshadow ( http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2044169 ). Given that the environment we're going to put these scripts together for contains Exchange 2007 SP3 on Windows Server 2008 R2. From looking at the tables for the backup script location, we find that the quiescing scripts need to be placed at C:\Windows\pre-freeze-script.bat for the start of backups, and C:\Windows\post-thaw-script.bat for finishing off the backup. Inside the pre-freeze script, I followed the examples for using diskshadow- all the pre-freeze script does is call the backup.cmd script found at c:\vmwarebackup.
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