afggy

Another workaround would be to expose the drive via iSCSI.

For Exchange 2010 Veeam Backup and Replication has an inbuilt tool (i.e. coming at no additional cost, unlike Symantec Exchange Agent) for granular recovery of Exchange Server items, be it either individual messages, contacts, notes, or entire mailboxes. It's called Veeam Explorer for Exchange.

I don't believe the OP uses Veeam B&R for backups, since it does not support free ESXi. However, as a side note regarding the mentioned issue affecting NFS storages, it was addressed by VMware in the KB2077360 patch.

mistersparky, you can check how Veeam B&R copes with your setup for free and verify whether it suits your needs, prior to buying it. Full trial version is available for 1 month, however even free version is capable of offloading backups to tape.

Yep, Veeam B&R management server can be installed on any Windows-based machine, regardless it’s physical or virtual. It is where you place backup proxy server components what is more important in terms of performance (though, I admit, the default proxy installed as a part of Veeam B&R installation is more than enough for small environments). Just consider system requirements for the proxies, the rule of thumb is a single core and additional 200MB of RAM per each concurrent task you're going to assign to this server. As for the backup target, then the most effective backup storage for Veeam B&R from the cost/quality perspective is an ordinary server stuffed with a bunch of hard drives (or directly attached to it).

Nick, seems like the VMFS datastore the said VMs reside on is formatted with less block size required to make a snapshot. There's a pretty informative thread on the Veeam Community Forums discussing similar issue, please review for more details (great resource for everyone using Veeam products, btw).

No, you cannot, neither free nor paid versions of Veeam B&R support VMware Workstation. Only vSphere is supported.