pre-reqs for snap manager in VMware environment

[RANJBASSI]

Hi

I am just looking for some clarification on Snap Manager.

We are currently looking at implementing Snap Manager for Exchange, SQL and Sharepoint and have a few questions. All of our servers relating to these technologies are Virtual servers.

• We have 2 Exchange 2010 SP3 Virtual Servers within our VMware farm. There is a separate exchange DB and a seperate front end hub transport server. All the disks for these servers are non-RDM VMDK disks. Will an implementation of Snap Manager work with this setup or do the disks need to be setup as RDM (physical or virtual) disks? I am reading some detail on this and from what I am reading it seems the snap product requires ‘raw’ access to the drives through the SAN and not as a virtual disk. Can you confirm this?

• Is snap drive required to be installed where snap manager is installed?

Do all snap manager products (SQL, Sharepoint) require direct SAN disk access for them to work?

We will be using Snap mirror and snap vault to protect the VM integrity but what we were looking to achieve with the snap manager products was the granularity so we wouldn’t need to restore a whole VM in the case of a single user mailbox recovery for exchange or if we needed to restore a SQL database.

Any advice on this would be most appreciated.

Thanks

[welch]

Pending on your versions of SnapManager, SnapDrive, and ONTAP, the answers may vary.  The best way to know is to check the Installation and Administration Guide for your respective SnapManager products (it can be found on the support page).  Recent versions of SMSQL(and therefore SMSP) do support running on VMDKs over NFS or FC, RDMs or direct attached.  However, currently Microsoft does not support running Exchange over VMDKs on NFS.  

Yes, SnapDrive is required for all SnapManagers.  A list of all required prerequs can be found in the IAG. 

As far as Single Mailbox recovery, hopefully you are using Single Mailbox Restore that integrates with SME.  If so, it allows you to create and mount a clone of your snapshot backups to recover individual items.  SMSP also has the ability to recover down to the item version level in SharePoint, and SQL has the ability to recover individual databases captured in a SnapShot. These granular restores are made possible by FlexClone.