DPM 2010 RC and Single Mailbox Restores

Well, the good news for NetApp and all the other vendors is that using DPM to recover a mailbox is just an utter nightmare.

New-MailboxDatabase -Recovery -Name "RecDB" -Server - "mbx1.domain.com" -EDBFilePath "path" -LogFolderPath "path"

Be careful not to mount the store otherwise you'll ruin the "allowfilerestore" part which will mean you need to go into the GUI (where you can see the store but not where you can create it)

Once you've done that you need to go to the DPM console, into Recovery and find the mailbox you want to restore. You tell the wizard what store you want to put the recovered mailbox into and then let the job run. The job will restore the entire database (up to a terabyte in Exchange 2010 remember) to the good old SATA disks at 65 IOPS (rather than your SAS at 180/200).

Finally you can export the mailbox you need from the Exchange console.

Elapsed time? A good 20 minutes, minimum, before you get your messages back and a whole Terabyte of space you have to reserve.

OR..........
SnapManager for Exchange. FlexClone/LUNClone (SDW will work it out for you) the snapshot (8 seconds, zero space). Use SMBR to get the items out of the mounted store. (about two minutes total but there's a dollar cost for the SMBR software)

OR.........
SnapManager for Exchange. FlexClone/LUNClone (SDW will work it out for you) the snapshot (8 seconds, zero space). Use the recovery database to mount the store and export-mailbox to get the items out of the mounted store. (about five minutes but it's free)

Bottom line is that the recovery features of DPM 2010 still make you recover far more core data than you need, make you restore that over the network and make you use different tools on different clients and workstations to get at the data. It's more complex.

As luck would have it you can eliminate some of this by using the hardware snapshots feature and I'll post a little bit about that when the lab boys have finished re-jigging and can give me a new 64bit guest for DPM.