A company using Dell Avamar has decided to virtualize their Microsoft Exchange environment using VMware...

Explanation/Reference:

You must use the backup agents to backup Exchange and SQL. Databases on Image level backups will not be consistent.

To backup the environments, you would need to do a guest level backup. i.e. Install the avamar agent, and the exchange VSS plugin on the Exchange server, and the SQL plugin on the sql server.

If you want to backup the OS, ensure you create windows datasets to skip the database files on the server, otherwise you'll be backing up database files that look totally different each time (consuming huge amounts of space on the grid), that will be no good to you (they'll be inconsistent)!

Besides the above points, the Exchange VSS plugin has some fairly useful functionality, like being able to backup databases in parrallel, and being able to do granular level restores (i'm still trying to get this to work).

Well worth using.

https://community.Dell.com/thread/126801