Veeam 5 + SBS 2003 + Exchange 2003 Logs

Just in case you are new here – I uber-heart Veeam and their various suite(s) of tools for managing VMware environments.  Last fall when Veeam 5 came out, with the ability to do even more backups/restores of VSS aware applications (read: Exchange, SQL, Active Directory) I was drooling all over my keyboard.  We've got many many customers running Veeam and backing up and truncating Exchange logs, and all sorts of other various processes.

But there's this one customer… no matter what I did… I could NOT get Veeam to successfully truncate the Exchange logs.  This is a fresh vSphere 4.1 ESXi install.  This is a fresh P2V.  But, this is an SBS 2003 box with Exchange 2003 on it.

After many different job creations and backups and failures and having to resort to NTBackup to flush the logs, one of our Veeam support guys – Drew – found a really interesting post in the Veeam Forums.

Yup, it turns out that SBS 2003 DISABLES the Exchange 2003 VSS Writer by default.

Well then Mr. Blogger helper dude, how do you ENABLE said setting?

The Microsoft KB Article #838183 of course.

It's a simple fix – you flip a single bit inside your registry, restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service, and try Veeam again.  This worked for me, but a healthy dose of "your mileage may vary" skepticism should always apply.  As always, backup your registry before making changes.

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