Like Paul says.

SnapDrive and SME give you the ability to do true online backups of Exchange without a visible outage and with most of the I/O and backup processing happening off-host, and by integrating with the Exchange backup API allows easy recovery of messages and/or whole mailboxes from snapshots.

Without these tools, you can still run Exchange on iSCSI, but your backup options are limited to:

1) Traditional "host-based" backups, preferably using the appropriate Exchange module for your backup products to allow "online" backups, providing you don't mind a performance hit on Exchange while backing up.

2) Leverage snapshots the way Paul described, which is all scriptable of course.  However, you will need to post a daily outage of a few minutes for Exchange backups. i.e. very tiny "backup windows"

regards,

Alan McLachlan
___________________________________
Solution Architect - Data Centre Solutions
Dimension Data Australia
Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au
Tel. +61 (0)2 61225123
Fax +61 (0)2 62486346
Mobile 0428 655644






Paul Galjan <galjan@gmail.com>
Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com

22/03/2005 01:17 AM
Please respond to Paul Galjan

       
        To:        "Holland, William L" <hollandwl@state.gov>
        cc:        "toasters@mathworks.com" <toasters@mathworks.com>
        Subject:        Re: Exchange and iSCSI



It's definitely possible, and some people do it.  However, you will
lose the ability to do supported backups via snapshots.  So, for
backups, you'll either do your typical tape backup type solution, or
you will have to shut down Exchange and dismount the LUNs that the
information store and logs live on, then snapshot, remount the LUNs
and start Exchange...

--paul



On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:30:05 -0500, Holland, William L
<hollandwl@state.gov> wrote:
> Is SnapDrive and SnapManager for Exchange really needed to run Exchange with
> databases on a filer using iSCSI?  Seems to me that it would be possible to
> use MS's iSCSI initiator then manually create the iSCSI Groups and LUNs
> where the databases and logs will be stored then use scripts to perform
> routine maintenance and backups.  Anyone out there using Exchange and iSCSI
> without SnapDrive and SnapManager for Exchange?
>



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