I have Exchange 2010 running in a Hyper-V VM (on new Dell servers and Powervault SAN). I run Windows Server Backup and during the first portion of the backup it runs an Exchange integrity check, and I can see eseutil.exe running as a background process. Unfortunately when it runs, it takes several hours to complete (full backup is 36 hours) and during the integrity check users cannot access Exchange. So I pulled up the resource monitor during the integrity check and it shows the disk queue length at around 1000. Yikes! Normal levels are rarely above 2. During the actual backup portion, the disk queue lengths drop back to normal (<1) even though the disk read/write activity are about the same. I can't imagine this is normal. Any ideas? Paul ---

I will do that the next time it runs, but I know it's running and not stuck...it does eventually finish. The main EDB is 280 GB (yes I know, way too big)...I'm going to run a shrink/defrag on it tonight as I did move many mailboxes to other local EDBs (on another disk). Paul ---

Hi Paul, Eseutil can take many hours to complete, especially on a large database such as yours. It *may* be that you can d something within hyper-v to improve disk performance, but the long and the short is that you are not experiencing anything unusual. have a look at this Tim McMichael blog post, which is, i think, pretty much what you are seeing: http://blogs.technet.com/b/timmcmic/archive/2011/07/12/exchange-2007-2010-windows-server-backup-and-performance-issues.aspx