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Things to Consider when Creating and Configuring Exchange Subclients
The following table shows subclient creation and configuration details specific to the Exchange iDataAgents.
Agent |
Type of Data | Default Subclient created during install of the Agent | Supports Default Subclient | Supports User Defined Subclient | Contents of the default subclient when user-defined subclient is present | Other Types of subclients supported by the Agent | Notes |
| Exchange Database iDataAgent | Exchange Storage Groups | Yes | Yes | Yes | storage groups not assigned to other subclients, unless otherwise configured* | None | None |
| Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent | Exchange Mailboxes/ messages | Yes | Yes | Yes | mailboxes not assigned to other subclients, unless otherwise configured* | Do Not Backup | None |
| Exchange Public/Web Folder iDataAgents | Exchange Public/Web Folder messages/ items | Yes | Yes | Yes | folders not assigned to other subclients, unless otherwise configured* | None | *See Caution Against Re-configuring Default Subclient Content. |
The following examples illustrate simple subclient configurations for Exchange iDataAgents:
The Exchange Database iDataAgent is designed to back up and restore database objects such as Mailbox Stores, Public Folder stores, and transaction logs residing on an Exchange Server. Subclient content for this iDataAgent consists of Storage Groups containing these stores and logs. After installing this iDataAgent, a default subclient is automatically created by the system and its content initially comprises Storage Groups in the Exchange Database on an Exchange Server. However, you can create additional user-defined subclients to contain different Storage Groups, and any content not assigned to them remains as content in the default subclient. Subclient content configuration for this iDataAgent consists of assigning Storage Groups to subclients from the Subclient Properties dialog box in the CommCell Console.
A useful way to distribute subclient content of an Exchange Database is by Storage Groups, as shown in the example below:
ExchangeServer01 contains the following Storage Groups in the Exchange Database:
After installing the Exchange Database iDataAgent, the default subclient content includes all of these Storage Groups. The data can then be distributed across subclients to better balance the backup load. For example, two new user-defined subclients were created, each containing a Storage Group, resulting in the following subclient content configuration for the client:
Distributing the client data using subclients in this way can help improve backup performance and provide flexibility for scheduling data protection operations.
Data protection filtering is not applicable for this agent.
Wildcards and regular expressions are not supported for this agent when defining Subclient Content.
For more information, see Things to Consider when Creating and Configuring Exchange Subclients.
The Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent is designed to back up and restore Exchange Mailboxes and messages residing within Mailbox Stores contained in Storage Groups in the Exchange Database on an Exchange Server. Subclient content for this iDataAgent consists of Mailboxes. After installing this iDataAgent, a default subclient is automatically created by the system and initially its content is unassigned until the first backup is run. During the first backup, the auto-discovery process will populate the content of the default subclient with all mailboxes in all Mailbox Stores in the Exchange Database on an Exchange Server. However, you can create additional user-defined subclients, and any content not assigned to them remains as content in the default subclient.
When you configure subclient content, you have a choice of methodologies to re-apportion the mailbox content across subclients within a backup set. You can either manually assign individual mailboxes to the user-defined subclients or, more typically, configure the content of user-defined subclients using an auto-discovery assignment method based on storage group affinity, Active Directory user group affinity, or wildcard pattern. For more information, see Discovering and Assigning New Mailboxes.
Once mailboxes have been auto-discovered and assigned to subclients, the subclient content for this iDataAgent is displayed similar to the following example:
| Display Name | Alias Name | SMTP Address |
| Aliyah Saadi | ASaadi | ASaadi@exch.company.com |
| Deepak Subrama | DSubrama | DSubrama@exch.company.com |
| Jacques Eiffel | JEiffel | JEiffel@exch.company.com |
| Kurt Merzbaum | KMerzbaum | KMerzbaum@exch.company.com |
| Viktor Valles | VValles | VValles@exch.company.com |
| Zhou Xu | ZXu | ZXu@exch.company.com |
Two useful ways to distribute content of an Exchange Mailbox client are by User Group or by letter of the alphabet. In the example below, mailboxes are assigned to different subclients based on which letter of the alphabet their corresponding Display Names begin with:
| Aliyah Saadi | ASaadi | ASaadi@exch.company.com |
| Deepak Subrama | DSubrama | DSubrama@exch.company.com |
| Jacques Eiffel | JEiffel | JEiffel@exch.company.com |
| Kurt Merzbaum | KMerzbaum | KMerzbaum@exch.company.com |
| Viktor Valles | VValles | VValles@exch.company.com |
| Zhou Xu | ZXu | ZXu@exch.company.com |
Distributing the client data using subclients in this way can help improve backup performance by organizing the workload on the Exchange Server into logical groupings.
Subclient-level Backup Filters and CommCell-level Global Filters are available for this agent to exclude specified mailbox folders, or folder patterns (using wildcards), from being backed up. For example, you can filter out the Junk E-mail and Spam folders so that messages within them do not get backed up. Subclient-level Backup Filters provide exclusion capabilities on a per-subclient basis, whereas Global Filters allow you to filter out data from data protection operations on all agents of a certain type within a CommCell. For more information, see Filters.
Wildcards and regular expressions are supported by this agent in the following functions:
Wildcards can be used in the Exclude the folders that contain the following patterns field when filtering data using Subclient-level Backup Filters and/or CommCell-level Global Filters.
Wildcards can be used when Configuring Mailboxes for Auto-discovery Using Regular Expressions.
For a list of wildcards supported by this iDataAgent, see Wildcards.
For more information, see Things to Consider when Creating and Configuring Exchange Subclients.
The Exchange Public Folder iDataAgent and Exchange Web Folder iDataAgent are designed to work together to back up and restore local copies of all Public Folders and Web Folders residing on an Exchange Server. The Exchange Public Folder iDataAgent backs up all Public Folders and objects contained within them on the default Public Folder tree, whereas the Exchange Web Folder iDataAgent backs up all Web Folders and objects contained within them on user-defined Public Folder trees. Subclient content for these iDataAgents consists of Folders. After installing each of these iDataAgents, a default subclient is automatically created by the system and initially its content is All Folders.
Under most circumstances, the default subclient alone is sufficient to back up and restore Public/Web Folders for your Exchange site. However, you can create user-defined subclients for these iDataAgents if needed to distribute the content among subclients. When user-defined subclients are created, any content not assigned to them remains as content in the default subclient.
When you configure subclient content, you browse the Public Folder tree structure and select the Folders you want protected. The resulting content will display the Folder names similar to the example shown below:
Corporate Policies
Departmental Projects
Demos
A useful way to distribute subclient content of a Public/Web Folder client is by Folder, as shown in this example:
Note that the default subclient above contains any Public/Web Folders not assigned to other user-defined subclients within the same backup set. In this case, All Folders includes the Corporate Policies Folder.
Distributing the client data using subclients in this way can help improve backup performance in cases where your site manages a high volume of Public/Web Folder data.
Subclient-level Backup Filters are available for these agents to exclude specified Folders or subfolders from being backed up. For example, suppose the Demos folder contains a subfolder called Obsoleted Projects that you do not want backed up. You can add a Subclient Filter for the user-defined subclient DemoInfo to exclude the Obsoleted Projects subfolder from being backed up. Filters can also be used in conjunction with the Default Subclient so that All Folders are backed up except the ones you specifically exclude. For more information, see Filters.
Wildcards and regular expressions are not supported for this agent when defining Subclient Content or Filters.
For more information, see Things to Consider when Creating and Configuring Exchange Subclients.
Once installed, the agent is configured and is therefore able to manage the data or volumes on the client computer. However, you can change certain aspects of the subclient configuration to manage the data in the manner that best suits your needs.
You can view or change the subclient configuration from the Subclient Properties dialog box. The following information can be configured.
You can enable or disable all operations for this CommCell object and all objects below it. For more information, see Activity Control.
Over time, new mailboxes are created to accommodate new Exchange accounts. For the Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent, Exchange Mailbox Archiver Agent, and the Online Content Indexing for Exchange Agent, the system performs an auto-discovery process at the beginning of each backup or migration archiving operation. The auto-discovery process detects any new mailboxes and automatically assigns them to the default subclient (unless otherwise configured for the Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent, Exchange Mailbox Archiver Agent, and the Online Content Indexing for Exchange Agent). While this feature ensures that all the new mailboxes will be automatically backed up/archived, you may want to manually discover and assign new mailboxes to specific subclients yourself. See Discovering and Assigning New Mailboxes for an overview of both manual discovery and auto-discovery assignment processes.
The Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent, Exchange Mailbox Archiver Agent, and the Online Content Indexing for Exchange Agent allow you to specify the assignment method that will be used to back up/archive/content index newly discovered mailboxes for all subclients of a particular backup set/archive set/content index set. Auto-discovered mailboxes can be assigned based on storage group affinity, Active Directory user group affinity, or wildcard pattern (for user-defined subclients only). This feature ensures that all the new mailboxes will be automatically backed up/content indexed/scanned for archiving. For these agents, you must first enable auto-discovery at the archive set / backup set / content index set level and specify the assignment method in order to auto-discover and assign new mailboxes. See Configure Mailboxes for Auto-Discovery for step-by-step instructions.
The Exchange Database iDataAgent can examine the event logs for the Exchange application to ensure that the three most common errors associated with file-level damage to an Exchange database have not occurred before initiating a backup of the database. According to Microsoft KB article 314917, the three most common errors are -1018 JET_errReadVerifyFailure, -1019 JET_errPageNotInitialized, and -1022 JET_errDiskIO. You can configure the Event Check feature for a subclient of the Exchange Database iDataAgent by enabling the corresponding option from the Subclient Properties (General) tab and then specifying a date and time to begin checking the Exchange application event log for these errors. Any of these errors occurring in the Exchange application event log before the specified date and time will be ignored, and any found after the specified date and time will cause the backup to fail. For step-by-step instructions, see Configure Event Check for Exchange Database.
You can define the content of the subclient. Most agents include a configure button that displays a dialog where you can add or modify the data included as subclient content. For step-by-step instructions, see Configure Subclient Content.
For more information, see Subclient Content.
Several configurable options to efficiently use available resources for transferring data secured by data protection operations are provided in the subclient. This includes the following:
You can enable or disable the encryption of data for transmission over unsecure networks and for storage on media. For more information, see Data Encryption.
You can view the data paths associated with the primary storage policy copy of the selected storage policy or incremental storage policy. You can also modify the data paths for the subclient including their priority. For additional information, see Configuring Alternate Data Paths for Subclients.
You can perform the following functions:
Only the Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent supports the ability to edit data protection filters, whereas the Exchange Public/Web Folder iDataAgents do not. Keep in mind that the Exchange Database iDataAgent does not support data protection filters.
You can enable or disable Global Filters. For more information, see Global Filters.
Global Filters are supported for the Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent.
You can add, modify or view Pre/Post processes for the subclient. These are batch files or shell scripts that you can run before or after certain job phases. For more information, see Pre/Post Processes.
You can associate the subclient to a storage policy. For more information, see Storage Policies.
You can rename a user-defined subclient.
The following pertains to Exchange Mailbox, Exchange Mailbox Archiver, Exchange Database, Exchange Public Folder, Exchange Public Folder Archiver, and Exchange Web Folder:
You can define an account with permissions to execute Pre/Post commands for the agent's archive, backup, or volume creation jobs.
See the Exchange Agents: Other User Accounts section in User Accounts and Passwords for more information.
You can perform the following functions:
For more information, see User Administration and Security.
The security tab is not available for the Exchange Database iDataAgents at the subclient level.
When creating and configuring subclients for Exchange iDataAgents, keep in mind the following considerations:
Because Recovery Storage Groups (RSGs) cannot be manually discovered or auto-discovered for the Exchange 2003 Database iDataAgent, they cannot be added to subclient content, and therefore cannot be backed up.
The Exchange Database iDataAgent for Exchange Server 2007 will not automatically filter out Recovery Storage Groups (RSGs) from subclient content. Hence, if you do not want to back up RSGs, then you will need to create a user-defined subclient and assign the RSGs as content. Afterwards, ensure that the subclient containing the RSGs do not have backups scheduled to run for it.
Exchange Public/Web Folder iDataAgents and Exchange Public Folder Archiver Agent: If you change the contents of the default subclient, newly-created folders will not be backed up/archived unless they are manually discovered and assigned to a subclient.