Daniel,
Snapmanager for Exchange directly leverages SnapDrive through a series of ZAPI calls. In the backup process, it interacts with Exchange and the filer to ensure that you get a backup of an active database in a valid state. In non-verified backups, SnapManager creates snapshots by having Exchange arrive to a "ready" state and then uses SnapDrive to take the snap. In verified backups, SnapManager uses SnapDrive to mount the lun inside of the snapshot to run eseutil against to ensure that the database is not in a dirty state, which is a timesaver when restoring, because then you don't have to run a verification on the data you are restoring.
While it is possible to set up scripts to do the same thing SME and SnapDrive does, SME does provide an easy to use interface and scheduler that saves much more time than writing, testing and perfecting backup scripts.
You should not have run into an issue with being able to see luns using SnapDrive 6 that were already created on the filer. Snapdrive 5.0 and up removed the issue with seeing luns not created using SnapDrive. The perplexity from the support personnel you spoke to would be genuine, as that is not a usual feature of the SnapDrive 6 software, which was designed specifically to address issues in Windows 2008.
If you took a snapdrvdc during the issue, or if you have a case number you could pass along to me, I could take a look and run it by our more senior SnapDrive and SnapManager specialists.
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From: Leeds, Daniel [mailto:dleeds@edmunds.com] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 10:44 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Exchange iscsi luns and Snapmanager/SMBR without snapdrive
asking the community while i wait on the official netapp answer.
are either Snapmanager for Exchange or the Single Mailbox Restore products absolutely tied to or unable to function completely if snapdrive is not present?
in short, this "easy to use" gui tool has wasted enough of our time already and I do not need anything other than the ontap command line and about 15 minutes to provision the proper igroups and luns requested by our Exchange admins and another minute to bring them up via the microsoft iscsi interface format them and put them under the microsoft cluster services control.
one last tidbit, although assured this would work fine, any luns that were created from the filer were completely unable to be seen, utilized, or managed via snapdrive. they had to be deleted and provisioned through the snapdrive interface which is not familiar to us and not behaving as shown to us by netapp. even support seemed to be perplexed although it was indicated that perhaps this was due to the servers being 2008 Server and the snapdrive version 6.
anyhow im only just clarifying if there is any fundamental dependency between snapdrive and the exchange snapshot tools.
:)
-- Daniel Leeds Manager, Storage Operations Edmunds, Inc. 1620 26th Street, Suite 400 South Santa Monica, CA 90404
310-309-4999 desk 310-430-0536 cell