VSS Confusion and Blank Stares

Oh my. A prospective customer recently made hand wavey gestures about VSS and, candidly, their lack of understanding about it. Since you can only do VSS backups with Exchange 2010 here's the scoop.

There are three components

Requester. This would be the thing that asks for the backup to happen. In my case it's SnapManager for Exchange. It could be BackupExec or any other application with an Exchange aware agent. It's software. Microsoft have one and it's SCDPM 2007/2010.

Writer. This would be the thing that gets the application ready for the backup. Exchange has one built in, as does SQL. You'll see it as a service.

Provider. This would be the thing that actually takes the VSS backup. In my case it's the snapshot function on the storage platform. In the case of DPM it's the product that drags the changed data off disk and over the network.

Article: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=822896 does a good job in terms of it being competition for paint drying but it's useful for those people willing to spend five minutes reading rather than posting questions on the Internet asking for it in potted form.