We've been working with Netapp and iSCSI for about a year now. For the most part, when their software works, it works very well. But when it doesn't it's pretty bad.

For example, we have a Clustered set of 920c's. We use Qlogic HBA's and GigE copper. We've had multiple issues of when the MS cluster fails over, we end up with multiple -1018 errors in our databases that need to be cleaned up. We've had three teams of consultants in to try to determine what is causing the problem, but to no avail.

We're running 7.0.0.1 on the Filer (not a great release.. Were working on upgrading). Windows 2003 Enterprise SP1. Exchange Enterprise SP1. iSCSI initiator 1.06 QLOGIC 4010C HBA's. 2.0.0.5

We have a dedicated VLAN for our storage network, and no errors are showing on the HBA's.

The last issue we had, we couldn't recover our snapshot (verified with eseutil as being good at the time of the backup) as it said the database was still corrupted after recovering. We ended up loosing about eight hours of email for 30 users.

Also, beware that iSCSI is VERY expensive on space. To get guaranteed snapshots, you have to reserver 100% extra space of your lun. That's about 30% more than your average NFS file systems. We didn't understand that going into it, and grossly underestimated our storage space needs.

We've had better luck with SQL, but still some issues.

In the lab, Single Mailbox restore worked very well. It basically "virtually" mounts the message store and you select the information you want to bring back into your production database. Exchange isn't the wiser.

I just wish we could get down to the bottom of our database issues involving iSCSI. The speed is incredible, and iSCSI is a great solution for our company on paper. In practice, it's been a little different experience.

Rod Newcomb

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Leeds, Daniel Sent: Friday, January 13, 2006 4:02 PM To: Brian Parent; Netapp List Subject: Re: exchange mailbox level recovery using NetApp

On 1/13/06 1:19 PM, "Brian Parent" bparent@calvin.ucsd.edu wrote:

We're considering using NetApp storage via iSCSI LUNs for Exchange email databases, but are concerned that we'll run into trouble due to some obscure/hidden Microsoft magic.

I suspect that the way NetApp does snapshots, and presents the disk as

a LUN to the exchange server, it prevents any such problems. That is,

there is no way for the M$ software to know the difference between the

live production data, and the snapshot data from which you're making mailbox level recovery.

Anyone actually had success with such a setup?

Netapp makes a product called SnapManager for Exchange. Look into this product. It allows things such as single mailbox restores and more.