SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange Question

[leo_pillifant]

I am new to NetApp. We are using it mainly for VMware.

I have read about SnapManger for Exchange and Single Mailbox Recovery and SanpVault.

Being new and with all the differnet products I am a little  confused.

So, here is my question. We have the license for SnapManager for Exchange, not sure about Single mailbox recovery. Our Exchange server is a physical server with DAS, running Exchanage 2007 sp3. Is there any way to use SnapMager for Exchange on this setup, or do  all the storage groups have to be on the NetApp?

Can SnapVault be used to backup the physical Exchange server?

Does anyone have experience running Exchange on NetApp? Our Exchange Admin and network admin say that the NetApp's do not have enough IOPs to run exchange. Can that be true?

[thinclient]

Hi

I am in the same boat, innsofar as I am new and also using NetApp for VMware and am trying to learn how to implement SM for Exchange. But I can answer one of your questions: yes, you do need to use the NetApp as primary storage for the Exchange server. Whether your NetApp appliance and iSCSI is fast enough for that, I don't know, I'm afraid. Our Exchange server is virtual under VMware.

Sorry I can't give you more!

Bob

[simon_campbell]

Hi,

We are running Exchange 2010 on VMWare vSphere 4.0 U2 with iSCSI. We only have approximately 1000 mailboxes but there are some TR's around on the NOW site in regards to running Exchange 2010 on NetApp with up to 10,000 mailboxes (sorry I can't remember the number). I don't know much about the migration from Exchange 2007 to 2010 as we migrated from Novell GroupWise 8...
Anyway, because you are licensed for SnapManager for Exchange (SME) you should be able to install SnapDrive for Windows which will allow you to easily create and connect iSCSI LUNs via VMWare RDM's. SME can then snapshot your database luns because it handles all the quiescing of the Exchange data etc. From there we SnapMirror to our secondary site, so you should be able to SnapVault as well. Our network is 1GbE, we have a dedicated VLAN for our ESX host storage network and we use the ESX iSCSI initiators.