Microsoft Exchange Server data protection in VMware environments

For Microsoft Exchange Server workloads that are running in a VMware ESXi virtual guest machine, you can take application-consistent backups of virtual machines that are hosting Microsoft Exchange Server data. You can recover database-level and mailbox-level backups from a virtual machine.

Before you back up data, identify your recovery point objective (RPO). The RPO helps you decide how often to back up data and affects the cost that is associated with data backups.

For example, you can schedule frequent virtual machine backups for necessary recovery points. The recovery point of a virtual machine backup is the time of the backup. While change-block tracking and data deduplication offer savings, virtual machine backups can be expensive if you create and delete many virtual machine snapshots.

Most traditional in-guest data protection methods provide appropriate RPOs, but these in-guest methods lose the efficiencies that are introduced by backing up data at the virtual machine level.

You can use Data Protection for VMware and Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange Server to back up data at a virtual machine level in a way that preserves backup efficiencies.

These software offerings work together to protect Microsoft Exchange Server data in a VMware environment when no other software products are used to back up Microsoft Exchange Server data.

For permission required to back up and restore application data for Microsoft Exchange Server, see technote 1647986.

Application protection is supported for VMware VMs in a VMware vSphere environment only.