HP Application Software Suite for Microsoft Exchange manual How VSS Works with Exchange

NOTE: For platform-specific release levels, refer to the latest HP 3PAR InForm OS Configuration Matrix. To obtain a copy of this documentation, go to http://www.hp.com/go/3par/, navigate to your product page, click Support for your product, and then click Manuals.

How VSS Works with Exchange

Figure 1 HP 3PAR VSS Provider Software for Microsoft Windows Operation Overview

1.The requestor (Recovery Manager) sends a command to the Volume Shadow Copy service to take a shadow copy of the selected Exchange storage group.

If a previous request is still in process, Recovery Manager adds the new request to the request queue.

2.The Volume Shadow Copy service communicates with the Exchange writer to flush the current log file generation to disk and suspend any writes to the log files and to the .edb file. The

.stm file is not allowed to grow; however, read-only access is still allowed. Therefore, anything that is already there can still be accessed from the client.

3.Volume Shadow Copy service communicates with the provider to initiate the shadow copy process for the disk volumes that contain Exchange data. VSS talks to the writers and providers to fix a point in time for the shadow copy to take place; it is the provider that actually does the shadow copy.

4.The shadow copy typically takes less than a minute. Clients that use Microsoft Outlook in cached mode do not notice any disruption. Clients of earlier versions of Outlook might see the hourglass icon for several moments during the shadow copy process.

5.After the shadow copy is created, Volume Shadow Copy service communicates with the Exchange writer to indicate that it can resume writing to disk.

6.The queues of the email transactions are written to the logs.

The shadow copy is now available to the requestor for backing up.

Recovery Manager Layout

Recovery Manager allows for many types of configuration, depending on your setup.

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