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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