Hi,

I'm back to the original topic of backing of Exchange, rather than restores.

A few people have said how well the Exchange agent is working for them. I'll 
submit an alternate view.

Over the past few months, we have had an almost endless number of failures with 
the Exchange agent. We are currently in the situation where we have no backups 
on two of our Exchange servers for 16 days.

I should point out that the root cause of these failures is not the Exchange 
agent. We have had an issue with our network infrastructure for some time and 
ADSM session regularly get disconnected. This is where the Exchange problem 
comes in. Unlike every other ADSM client type that we use, the Exchange agent 
does not automatically reconnect after a transient network failure. It just 
dies. And it requires manual intervention to restart the backup. Our Exchange 
databases are now so large ( > 40 GB) that the chances of getting a full backup 
between communication failures is almost non-existent.

We have also uncovered another problem where, once an incremental backup fails, 
we cannot run another incremental backup until a full backup is performed.

And one last problem, because our full Exchange backups are so large, we direct 
most of them direct to tape (by setting a 15 GB maximum file size on the disk 
storage pool). We have uncovered a problem where if all tape drives are in use, 
including one by an exchange backup, the backups will be pre-empted by 
housekeeping tasks such as space reclaimation.

This has been, and continues to be, extremely frustrating (and business crital) 
to us. And IBM to date have been far less responsive than they need to be. 
Despite the fact that we have been so long with backups, IBM have yet to 
provide any acceptable workaround.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the Exchange agent isn't trouble free 
as some others have found.


Trevor