When it comes to designing a vSphere environment, a lot of topics come into play in deciding how to provision storage to a virtual machine (VM). One decision point is whether or not to use Raw Device Mappings or RDMs. RDMs allow a special file in a VMFS volume to act as a proxy for a storage resource. The logical unit number, or LUN, that is a candidate for an RDM is attached to an individual VM; rather than formatted for the entire cluster. The benefits of using an RDM are for clustering support requirements and to allow disk commands to be sent directly to the storage resource from a VM.

In the course of using Veeam Backup & Replication’s vPower capabilities, we may observe that different operations give us different options and default values. Specifically, if we are to run a virtual machine from the most recent backup for a virtual lab or Instant VM Recovery the options are different for where updates to the virtual disks are to be placed.

One of the cool features of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 is its ability to document the status of the virtual machine backup within the virtual machine’s annotations by using attributes. This is one of the many notification options for an individual job, which may contain one or more virtual machines. Other notification options are also available, including email and SNMP.

Today Veeam hosted a webinar titled “Running Exchange on VMware”. Most of the focus of course was on backup and recovery of Exchange once it’s been virtualized. As I was preparing for the webinar (with a lot of help from Anton) I realized that the information would also make a good blog post. Below are the main points of backup and recovery for Microsoft Exchange and how Veeam Backup & Replication v5 addresses them.