AvCsGateway Service restarts on own

[Beth Verish]

Unity 4.2.1, with secondary server for failover, VM only with Exchange message store.

I just ran commserver\av* kill command and all of the av* services stop as expected but AvCsGateway service restarts all on its' own. Why? Same thing with mssqlserver service.

Thanks.

[lindborg]

MSSQL services start because the gateway is starting. The gateway likely starts up because you didn't kill the status tray icon for Unity. Every few seconds it checks the status of Unity which requires the gateway - if it's not up, it'll ask it to start.

If you're programatically shutting down Unity (which I suspect you are), be sure to kill the tray status app before you start killing services to prevent that. The app shows up as "AvCsTrayStatus" in the process list.

[Beth Verish]

Thanks for the information, very helpful.

What I am trying to do is backup the priamry unity while the secondary serves my voice mail users.

I figure if I can stop unity, sql and exchange on the primary then I would feel comfortable with backing it up and being able to do a bare metal restore.

I may be unsuccessful and barking up the wrong tree. I may have to rely solely on DiRT but it sure would be nice to have an image backup to restore from. Thanks.

[Hin Lee]

I tried setting up the services to manually start once before to see if I can use NTbackup for backing up and restoring and it did not work for me. It was in sql that I had a problem. I would suggest using backupexec or some other software to do achieve "bare metal" restore. Of course you will need "sql agent" to succesfully do a backup of sql.

I hope you meant exchange management tools on the unity server because you are not supposed to have an exchange server on failover unity servers.

[Beth Verish]

The NTBackup/SQL problem you had, was SQL stopped before you performed the backup?

And yes, only exchange mgmnt tools on the unity server as we have 2 2-node exchange servers for the message store.