NetApp SnapManager for Exchange (SME) Restore takes Physical Disk offline

by Bharat Suneja

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with NetApp’s SnapManager for Exchange (SME) backup utility.

To restore a store, SME needs to take the Physical Disk resource offline. (Actually swaps it with the volume/LUN that has the backup). When this happens, the Exchange System Manager (and thereby the entire Exchange Virtual Server) goes down – because it depends on all the Physical Disk resources. Weird!

That means even if some disks and the stores residing on them are OK, all your users will suffer an outage when SME does a restore of a single store or a storage group.

I wish NetApp finds a better way to do this – or perhaps set up the cluster to not depend on the Physical Disk resources – or ALL the physical disk resources.

Alternatively, I’m looking at changing the System Attendant Resources’s dependencies – just try and remove the disks with the Storage Group to be restored from the list.

From the SME docs:

In a Windows cluster, all resources that are directly or indirectly dependent on the LUN that is to be restored are taken offline, as well as the LUN itself. This means that the entire Exchange virtual server (all storage groups) is offline.

Caution:Do not attempt to manage any cluster resources while the restore is running.

If a cluster move group operation occurs during the restore (for example, if the node that owns the resources goes down) you must restart the SnapManager user interface and the restore.

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Anonymous February 21, 2007 at 10:53 am

We just tried to do this in our lab and the EVS resources DID NOT go offline. Also, we have a backup verification server but the disk mounts locally to the cluster node instead of the backup verification server.

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