I'm hoping to get a solution/input/suggestions.
Current setup:
Site A:
1 x BE 3600 Appliance
1 x Exchange Server with 6 databases (4 are about 250 GB each) - about 64 GB ram, 8 core CPU.
Site B:
1 x BE 3600 Appliance
(eventually, there will be another Exchange server set up here as part of a DAG)
I have separate, weekly full backups of each Exchange database (staggered across different days). The fulls seem to go fairly well (about 5 hours each for the large databases with an average job rate of 2,000 MB/Min) when backing up to dedupe storage on the Appliance itself. However, the daily incrementals crap out after a couple days (currently it's doing 1-11 MB/min).. almost to the point where incrementals take as long as the Fulls. I'll run into a VFF Open Failure or a -1022 I/O Error.
Now i've read elsewhere on the forums that the dedupe for Exchange is just not up to par, and that I should do regular disk storage. This isn't really an option. And I also read that when a DAG is set up, I should not do client-side deduplication (which leaves only the Appliance). In this scenario, it adds about 3-4 hours to each backup on Exchange.
On top of all that, I need to perform replication across the two servers (currently just duplicating backup sets to Site B).
Are there any changes I need to make to increase/maintain performance? (AOFO is disabled, currently all client side deduplication, and i reduced the concurrent jobs to dedupe storage to 1).
Do we need manually install the Exchange Tools on the Backup Exec Appliance as well when doing Exchange backups?