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