NetApp Single Mailbox Restore (SMR) for Exchange for Virtualised Exchange Servers

NetApp Single Mailbox Restore for Exchange 2010 is, well, a snap to use when your Exchange server is running in the “NetApp way”.  What is the NetApp way you ask?  Well, in a nutshell, it is when you have your physical Exchange box hooked up to your SAN via iSCSI or FCP.  If you are virtualised then you’ll need to present your disks via RDM (vSphere) or pass-through if you live in MS land.

What I address here is the case where you have an Exchange server virtualised with Hyper-V, with your hard drives attached as VHD’s.  Even though this example uses Hyper-V, the principles are also applicable to a vSphere environment.

Mounting the NetApp Snapshot

1. Open NetApp SnapDrive on a host connected to your Filer via either FCP or iSCSI
2. Navigate to the Disks node and expand the LUN containing the VHD which in turn contains your Exchange DB’s.
   
3. Under Snapshot Copies, right-click point in time snapshot that you wish to restore and select Connect Disk
   
4. The Connect Disk Wizard will start.  Click Next
   
5. Select the appropriate snapshot and click next.
   
6. Click Next on the the “Important Properties…” screen (Don’t change anything here)
   
7. Set the LUN type as Dedicated and click Next
   
8. Assign a Drive Letter and click Next
   
9. Select your initiators and click Next
   
10. Select Manual on the Initiator Group Management Screen and click Next
    
11. Select the appropriate iGroup and click Next
    
12. Click Finish to complete the SnapDrive Connect Disk Wizard
    

Your NetApp snapshot should now be mounted as a drive accessible through Windows Explorer, If you browse to it it should contain the VHD hosting your Exchange DB.  The next step is to mount the VHD so that it is accessible to SMR.

Mounting the VHD

1. Open Server Manager.  Navigate to Storage – Disk Management.  Right-click Disk Management and click Attach VHD
   
2. Browse to the VHD from the previous section and click OK
   

Your VHD will now be mounted with the next available drive letter and accessible via Windows Explorer.  The next and final step will be to mount our mailbox with SMR and get restoring!

Restoring with SMR

1. Open Single Mailbox Recovery and click File – Open Source
   
2. Browse to your source EDB file, ignoring any warnings about missing log files (Hooray for application-aware snapshots!) and click OK
   
3. SMR will now process your database and allow you to restore a mailbox, folder or item to PST or an Exchange Server.
   

Awesome, but once done we have to clean up after ourselves by dismounting the VHD and disconnecting the temporary NetApp SnapShot LUN.

Cleanup

1. Open Server Manager. Navigate to Storage – Disk Management. Right-click Disk Management and click Detach VHD
   
2. Take care to *not* check the “Delete…” box and click OK
   
3. Open SnapDrive and go to the Disks node.  Right click your temporary SnapShot LUN and click Disconnect Disk.
   

Configuring NetApp SnapManager for Hyper-V (Part 1) – Creating the Snapinfo LUN

Simple as this sounds I found that the process is not as simple and as well documented as it could be, especially with regards to creating the clustered SnapInfo LUN and folders.  Consequently I decided to document it with (a first for this blog) screenshots.

I am going to assume that you have already hooked up your hosts to your NetApp system, and that you’ve installed SnapDrive and SnapManager for Hyper-V.

The steps, in a nutshell, are:

1. Create the Snapinfo LUN
2. Make the Snapinfo LUN a highly available clustered resource
3. Configure SnapManager for Hyper-V
   

Creating the SnapInfo LUN

1. Create a volume to host your Hyper-V SnapInfo LUN
2. Open up Snapdrive on of your Hyper-V cluster nodes, go to the Disks node, and click Create Disk.  This launches the Create Disk Wizard.
3. Click Next.  Now highlight the volume you created in step 1, enter a LUN name and description:
4. Click Next.  Very Important – select Shared (Microsoft Cluster Services Only)
5. Click Next. The following list should list the active nodes in your Failover Cluster.
6. Click Next. Select the appropriate options and size for your environment***
7. Click Next. Select the initiators to be mapped to the LUN
8. Click Next.  Select whether you want to manually select the igroups (collection of initiators) or whether you want the filer to do it automatically.
9. Click Next. Choose the option to create a new Cluster Group to host the LUN
10. Click Next and click Finish to exit the wizard.

To recap, the above will:

• Create a LUN on the volume of your choosing
• Format the LUN with the NTFS filesystem
• Add the disk to your Failover Cluster as part of a Cluster group
• Assign a driveletter to the disk.

***SnapInfo LUN Size Provisioning:  The NetApp filer will store about 50KB metadata per VM per snapshot.  Due to the way Hyper-V snapshots work it will store two snaps per snapshot, therefore if we backup 20 VM’s once per day our sizing will be as follows:  20 * 50KB = 1MB * 2 = 2MB per day.  NetApp allows us to store 255 snapshots per volume so we should cater for 510 MB total.  I give it 10GB just because I can.  And because thin provisioning works.