Restoring Exchange in a Virtual Environment

If you can help it, just don't do it.

It's been a long time since I've had to restore an Exchange server at all, so it took me a while just to get the process down. Still, even after restoring Exchange 'by the book' I am running into errors that I can find almost no reference to anywhere on the web.

I believe it has something to do with the fact that the server was originally a physical machine which I converted to a VM and am now running in VMWare Workstation. The old volumes that previously contained the Exchange store are no longer available, so after cloning the Windows drive to the virtual machine I added the disks I needed and started the restore process.

Everything looks like it should be fine, but for some reason when I try to mount the Information Store Exchange tells me that the Hard Recovery option was not set on the restored database, even though I know for a fact that it was.

I thought that this was okay since I could still run the "eseutil /cc" command on it to manually set that option, but this fails with an error 0xC8000713. The only reference I found to this was here. This seems to be telling me that it can't load the restore.env file, although it could also be talking about the .mdb file itself... there isn't really any way to know yet.

In any case, I've had problems with either Yosemite Backup and/or Eseutil in regards to accessing the new volumes left and right. I'm guessing that it has something to do that the system is now running from a VMWare Virtual SCSI interface, instead of the old QLogic Fibre controller that it was using before. I would try the restore on the original system, but I have no way to add any external drives to it.

On top of all of this, when I boot the VM, the wmiprvse.exe service will randomly poll the c: drive to death for long periods of time which makes the machine virtually unusable. This also started after I moved the machine into the virtual environment and I have yet to solve the problem. That being said, I think I can at least alleviate it a little by moving the VM to a host machine that has a dedicated SCSI RAID volume availble for it instead of a SATAu RAID that is being shared with other things.

If I eventually work through this, I'll post my findings for the world (that is, all 2 or 3 of my fans) to see...

UPDATE

So I finally got around the WMI problem I was having by just Ghosting the original server to another identical machine. I just had to take two 146GB SCSI drives and stripe them so I would get enough space to run my restore of the Exchange database, as those machines have no way to attach anything other than fibre-based storage, externally.

After running the restore again, I was still unable to mount the database. I received the same error (at least one of them, anyway) in the Event Log as I did last time- Event 619. This basically says that Hard Recovery was not completed on the DB. After looking at the details of what ESEUtil was doing, I figured out that there were Exchange Log files missing that should have been restored.

For now, I've basically accepted the fact that YB doesn't seem to have grabbed all of my log files at the time it ran it's incremental backup of Exchange. I wasn't the person who was directly maintaining the backups at the time it was run, but in the past I had always preferred to have only full backups of Exchange for reasons just like this. In the time between the full backup and the incremental backup, I had moved a ton of mailboxes to this server and so there was about an additional 30GB added onto the database. This means about 5,000 additional log files are there, which may explain why not all of them were grabbed... it's a bit of an unusual scenario.

Hostile Takeover

The bottom line is that, I'm thankful to have a job. I really do have it pretty good, so I shouldn't complain.

The company that I've worked at for a (non-consecutive) total of over 5 years, Yosemite Technologies, was bought out by Barracuda Networks last December. Overall, I would have to say that it was a good thing since YT would probably not have lasted much longer and we all would have been unemployed. On the other hand, there are definitely a few things that I miss about Yosemite.

It was a much smaller company that Barracuda- at the time we were purchased, only 35 employees compared to well over 500. When a company gets to be the size that we are now there are certain factors that come into play which are all but avoidable. Communication between departments and remote offices becomes much more inefficient. Many times, it seems like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. The strangest thing to me is the fact that I can go to our headquarters and only recognize a few people out of the hundreds that are there, and not know what the hell most of the rest of the people do.

I can say for sure that Yosemite, by comparison, was condensed down as far as it could go. By last December, the 35-or-so people who were still here were each doing the work that 3 or more people used to do (at it's peak, Yosemite Technologies employed more than 125 people). The people who were left were probably here because we were always the ones who did the best work and did it as efficiently as possible. Also, most of us had already worked here past the 5 year mark and had grown to be good friends. We all worked very well together and communicated efficiently.

Something else that is new to me/us is the fact that we are no longer the central office. In the past, Fresno was basically the office where all of our main operations were conducted. For that reason, everyone in this office had a good idea of what was going on in practically every aspect of the company and it was a good feeling that was probably taken for granted. Now, Fresno is merely a satellite office to the headquarters in Campbell and we tend to feel a little more left out these days. There is definitely something to be said about working with people in the same physical office- it helps to remind them that you actually exist when you need cooperation from them on something you're working on.

Other than that, things in the IT department aren't so bad. I actually have it pretty good since I am the only IT person in the Fresno office and don't have any real superiors here. If I wanted to, I could probably get away with working 10 hours a week and doing the rest from home as long as I responded to any problems that people here have in a reasonable fashion. When I do interact with other people in IT, I have to say that things are pretty mellow. They are happy with me as long as I continue to keep things under control here and show that I am getting things done... no big deal.

As for people in other departments, I feel for them. They've had to put up with increased demands, less tools to do their jobs, unrealistic expectations from unrealistic superiors, co-workers who work 150 miles away and don't know what they're doing, co-workers with super-egos, etc. All of which is something that we at Yosemite hadn't dealt with in at least 2 years or so for the most part.

Other things that suck. They: took away our water dispenser; are going to take our 25 cent snack and soda machines; don't pay for our cell phones outright anymore and instead give us reimbursements for our bills once a month; give us only 3 weeks of paid-time-off a year instead of 6, even though I'm past the 5-year mark; don't let us buy anything from Dell when 90% of our equipment is from them; take a month or more to approve a purchase request to buy almost anything; force us to comply with policies that are completely irrelevant to our environment even though we've clearly pointed out that they are and only slow things down for us.

Positive things. We: all got to keep our existing salaries; have two really flashy company cars (Scion xB's) that we can use whenever we want; still get to stay in our lush Fresno office (I have a nice, large private office when my manager has to sit in a cubicle that is half the size of my room and has no privacy); are allowed to drink beer at work and expense a certain amount every month; have an awesome house to stay at if and when any of us have to stay the night in San Jose... flat-screen LCD TV's in almost every room, iPod hookups, automatic fireplace, spa, lush furniture, mini-bar, the works; and I basically have free reign over the network in Fresno.

I'll probably get in trouble for posting this, so here's the part where I kiss the company's ass.

I will say that it is a good experience for me in the sense that this is a real, Silicone Valley based technology company who is currently doing really well when most other businesses are struggling to survive. Working with the IT people in Campbell has already taught me some new things, even if I don't normally admit it. Some of the ways that they organize things and the tools that they use are new ideas to me, and I like the idea of being able to adapt those into my experience. Getting to work with Tobin, who is probably the most important IT person in the company, has been a pleasure.

One last thing I like is the fact that I get to have a Barracuda Spam/Virus firewall to use at my house for free. I should be getting it this week, at which point I'm going to set up a new mail server at my house and play with it.

In any case, no one ever specifically knows what the future holds for anyone around here, but I do hope to be here for a long time to come.