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VERITAS EDUCATION INSTRUCTOR ARTICLES DECEMBER 2002

1. Basic Configuration of the VERITAS NetBackup Agent for Microsoft Exchange 2. Using Quick I/O to improve database performance

BASIC CONFIGURATION OF THE VERITAS NETBACKUP AGENT FOR MICROSOFT EXCHANGE

The VERITAS NetBackup 4.5 Agent for Microsoft Exchange provides integration between the NetBackup and the Exchange applications. The principal reason to provide an enhanced level of integration is to use features within the database to provide structured access to the database, which allows online, nondisruptive backups. This means that backups and restores are performed without taking the database offline, extending the availability of the data. The NetBackup Exchange Agent provides data access through standard Microsoft APIs, which ensures reliable, high-performance backups and restores of Exchange data. The agent also offers the ability to restore individual Exchange mailboxes, folders, or messages. By executing a special brick-level backup, recovering individual mailboxes, folders, or email messages no longer requires an extra server. Before configuring a backup policy for Exchange, install the Exchange Agent license key on the NetBackup Master Server. The NetBackup client, also the Exchange Server, has several prerequisites before an Exchange Backup Policy can be created. You must first install the NetBackup Client software and the NetBackup for Exchange software. Then configure the server for the NetBackup Exchange Agent. If you are planning to perform incremental backups, whether cumulative or differential, you must disable circular logging in Exchange. If you are planning to perform individual mailbox backups, you must configure the NetBackup Client Service to log on with a user account rather than the system account. This user account must have a mailbox associated with it. Finally, configure NetBackup to use this mailbox by setting it up in the clients properties, accessed from the Master Server under Host Properties. Now you are ready to create your Exchange Policy. Open the NetBackup Administration Console and select Policies. From the Actions menu select New New Policy. The Add a New Policy Box dialog box is displayed. Enter a unique name for your policy and choose whether or not to use the wizard to create the policy. Whether using the wizard or the Add New Policy dialog box, you will need to configure the following four components: Attributes o Policy type: You must select MS-Exchange-Server. o Policy volume pool: It is common practice to use a separate volume pool for Exchange backups. Schedules At a minimum, you must specify the backup type, the schedule type, the retention level, and the start window for the schedule. These are the choices for the type of backup: o A Full Backup backs up the Exchange databases and the transaction logs, truncating (deleting) the logs upon completion of the backup. o A Differential Incremental Backup backs up only the transaction logs, truncating them upon completion of the backup. o A Cumulative Incremental Backup backs up only the transaction logs but does not truncate upon completion.

Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

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A User Backup enables the Exchange administrator to perform backups from the Exchange Server. Clients Add the Exchange Servers to the list of clients to be backed up. Files Define the Exchange objects, such as databases, mailboxes and folders that need to be backed up. Available choices will depend on the directive set that you are using. o MS_Exchange_5.x: Choose to back up either the Directory or the Information Store. o MS_Exchange_2000: The only available directive is the Information Store. When using Exchange 2000, all directory information is stored in the Windows Active Directory. Be sure that you are also backing up your Active Directory with a separate policy. o MS_Exchange_Mailbox: You can choose the Mailbox directive alone to back up all mailboxes, or you can include the individual mailbox names. Caution: Do not mix directives from different sets in the same policy. Information Store and Mailbox backups must be run separately. o

Now that you have completed the configuration and policy setup, you should be able to back up Exchange. Test the policy to verify that it functions as expected. If you created full and incremental type schedules, execute a manual backup of the policy from the NetBackup Administration Console. If you created a user type schedule, execute a user backup from the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface on the Exchange Server. Monitor your backup in the Activity Monitor to verify successful completion.
Keri Sprinkle VERITAS Software, Technical Training Staff

USING QUICK I/O TO IMPROVE DATABASE PERFORMANCE

I have found that many customers attending my Database Edition for Oracle classes have purchased the product but have not implemented one of the easiest options for improving database performance, Quick I/O. Many of the customers are using the Volume Manager and File System base functionality, but have not turned Quick I/O on. Using Quick I/O is easy. It is easy to set up and easy to convert existing database file formats to Quick I/O format. If setting up Quick I/O is easy and converting existing databases to Quick I/O is easy, why dont more customers do it? Maybe they just need a push in the right direction. Lets explain what Quick I/O is, what the benefits of Quick I/O are and what is required to convert a database to Quick I/O. What is Quick I/O? Quick I/O is a licensed feature of the VERITAS File System available with a Database Edition license. Quick I/O allows for the flexibility of managing database files in a file system: the files can be moved, copied, seen, backed up, and managed as regular files in the file system. Quick I/O also removes much of the file system overhead to realize raw device performance with the benefit of running on a file system. What are the benefits of Quick I/O? Quick I/O removes the double buffering that exists when Oracle data files live in a file system. For each block that is read, a copy is placed in the file system cache and then a second copy is placed in the Oracle cache. This means that the block of data is stored in memory twice, and requires CPU cycles to copy the block to both memory locations. With Quick I/O the file system cache is bypassed. This frees the CPU from some copy cycles and also stores the block in one location in memory instead of two. This frees up additional memory that could be assigned to Oracles SGA. Performance is gained through reduced CPU overhead and additional memory to cache additional data blocks Quick I/O removes the single writer lock on a file in the file system. File systems lock files that are being written so only one process at a time has write access to the file. Oracle controls locking within the database instance at

Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

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the row level, so there is no need for the file system to perform locking. Quick I/O removes the file system locking, thus adding performance by removing this bottleneck. Quick I/O files present themselves to Oracle as raw devices. When Oracle sees a raw device asynchronous I/O can be performed (called KAIO or Kernel Asynchronous I/O in Solaris). This is a faster method of performing data I/O. I/O requests are sent straight to the kernel instead of to another process. This has the benefit of incurring less context switches and less CPU overhead. Asynchronous I/O only works with raw devices, not file systems. Database servers cannot issue asynchronous I/O requests to files in file system; the lack of asynchronous I/O significantly degrades performance. Quick I/O makes files in the file system appear as raw devices. A special driver is called to access the file as a character device and allows asynchronous I/O to be performed and performance to be enhanced. Quick I/O files are regular files in the file system. They can be managed as any other file. They can be moved, copied, or backed up. The only thing to be aware of is to back up the link that is created with the Quick I/O file (see below). How can I convert my existing database to Quick I/O? Converting existing databases to Quick I/O is relatively easy. First of all the data files for the database must exist in Veritas File Systems. If this is not true, the data files will have to be moved to a Veritas File System first. Once the Data Files are in a Veritas File System the conversion process is simple. 1. As the Oracle user (or a user that has access to the catalog tables of Oracle), run a script called qio_getdbfiles. This script will read the catalog tables from Oracle to determine the Oracle data files in use by the instance. It will create a file called mkqio.dat in the current directory with a list of the databases data files. 2. Shutdown the database 3. Run a script called qio_convertdbfiles. This script will take all of the Oracle data files listed in the mkqio.dat file and move them to hidden files. That is, if a file is called users.dbf the file is renamed . users.dbf A link is then created to the hidden file with a special naming convention. The link name is the name of the original data file. The database continues to point at the original name that is now a link to a file that has been converted to Quick I/O. The ::cdev:vxfs: extension to the file tells the file system to access this file using the Quick I/O driver. That is, the link would look like this users.dbf .users.dbf::cdev:vxfs: 4. Start up the database Whats new with Oracle 9i Oracle 9i was released with the Oracle Disk Manager. This is a new tool within Oracle for managing the database data files. It also has an API to allow other vendors to add additional capabilities. The VERITAS Extension for the Oracle Disk Manager allows the capabilities of Quick I/O to be added to Oracle through a library. This makes raw performance on file system files more seamless. The VERITAS Extension for the Oracle Disk Manager is available with Database Edition for Oracle 3.0 or higher. Summary As you can see, adding Quick I/O to an existing Oracle database is simple. It is an easy way to realize performance gains with VERITAS Database Edition for Oracle. By simply converting your existing database file to Quick I/O, you can eliminate double buffering and single writer locks, as well as take advantage of Kernel Asynchronous I/O.
Geoff Bergren VERITAS Software, Technical Training Staff

Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.