This tutorial will guide you through installing SnapManager for Exchange. SnapManager for Exchange works in conjuction with SnapDrive for Windows. If you haven’t already installed SnapDrive you can follow the Installing Netapp SnapDrive for Windows tutorial before continuing.
1. Double click on the installation and file to start the installation wizard. Click Next.
All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.
Hi
Do all snap manager products (SQL, Sharepoint) require direct SAN
disk access for them to work? As all of these services in our estate are VMs with VMDKS. We don’t and prefer not use Physical or virtual RDMs for our VMs mainly from a point that administration can be a little more difficult.
We are 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.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Hi, unfortunately you are only able to use snapmanager for Exchange/SQL with SAN based access as it relies on SnapDrive. The only 2 options you have are direct attached lun to the VM or RDM via VMware. If you use RDM via VMware the snapdrive component needs to see and talk to vCenter
Thanks for that reply David.
So I am guessing if we want to be able to be perform individual mailbox restores using snap manager/snap drive is our only option but we need to convert from VMDK to RDM disks for our mailbox and log drives?
Very useful site you have here. I have shared it with a few colleagues at work, we based in the UK and they all really impressed. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the kind words. You are correct with the RDM’s, just remember that your snapmanager will need access to the vcenter so if it is for 1 customer it shouldn’t be a problem, however if you are hosting a cloud based infrastructure I wouldn’t allow 1 customer snapmanager access to the vcenter. If you do use VMDK only, snapmanager will stream the backup and not use snapshots.
Hi David
Can I confirm that we could continue to use VMDKs rather than migrate to vRDMs for our Exchange, SQL etc and the backup will still perform it will just do this in a different manner? stream rather than snapshot? if that is the case I assume that has some drawbacks like slower backup times? Is there a snapmanager product for Active Directory also?
The reason I ask is we have just performed a restore of our active directory as a test DR scenario and I have run into all sort of issues and I believe its because we have taken snapshots on the Netapp using snapmirror/vault and because it’s not a consistent backup its brought up AD in a inconsistent fashion.
Thanks
Hi, for active directory you would have to tick the box that says quiesce the vm within vsc, for snapmanager for exchange, yes you are correct. If you open up a new thread i’ll be able to help you bring up crash consistent AD’s from snapmirror/snapvault etc If you want to use netapp snaps with exchange and sql without having to create rdm’s I would suggest to use veeam 8