VMware snapshots with exchange?

[galchen]

Hi,

I have a customer says that EMC presented a solution and claimed that  Vmware snaphosts with VI 3.5U2 and Vmtools are having VSS not only to the virtual luns but also to the Exchange DB and there for the Vmware snapshots are application consistent.

With such capability we could do an application consistent snapsots for Exchange with SMVI (expect for the point in time restore, the BC functionality and so on)

but I'm not familiar with such an capability of Vmtools.

Are you?

[radek_kubka]

EMC is quite often *saying* they can do something clever - ask the customer to challenge EMC to demo the functionality in question.

And I am talking about proper, dynamic demo, not a pre-recorded webex stream 😉 This is where SnapManager products show their competitive advantage - you can actually use them & show how to recover, be it VMware datastore or Exchange DB (albeit I am fairly confident you need two of them for both relevant data sets)

I know some cusomers who purchased EMC Cellera's for VMware environment over a year ago & their solution is still in "the implementation phase"

Regards,
Radek

[amiller_1]

So....this is technically true....SMVI when it triggers a VMware snapshot can utilize the VMware tools the same way anything else does to hook into VSS.

The larger point is that while this could be good enough for DR (barely....you won't have corruption but if you had to start up off this SQL/Exchange wouldn't be happy) it's no good for what most people want (which is what you get out of SnapManager for SQL/Exchange).