Hi...
We currently have an "interesting" discussion with NetApp Support. Maybe the community would like to weigh in.
We've used SMBR with SME for years. Always had it installed on a separate machine with SnapDrive and Outlook on it. When a restore needed to be done we simply mounted a clone of the Mailbox DB LUN on the SMBR machine, mounted the DB in SMBR and so on. Worked like a charm.
Now we "upgraded" to SnapCenter and SMBR 8.0.1.
It looks really fancy -> https://youtu.be/9vnEtG5MTRQ
We assumed that it would be a similar workflow with SMBR on a separate machine, but NetApp Support now tells us that we need to install SMBR together with outlook on each and every Mailbox DB server. Outlook on an Exchange server is a big no no and no decent Exchange server admin in an enterprise environment will allow it.
We do not understand why this should be required. SMBR should be able to query the SnapCenter server for DBs in valid backups, the user then selects the DB and since SnapCenter knows on which LUN it's located, it can clone and mount it on the machine that's running SMBR. SMBR can then mount the EDB and restores can be done to PST or Echange Mailbox just as before.
Can somebody please confirm that this is not true? We're 100% certainly not going to install Outlook on our Mailbox DB Servers. Furthermore attaching LUN clones on a productive server goes against our change management policies and could only be done after hours, which is also unacceptable.
Thanks for any inputs!