Application recovery in Veeam Backup and Replication has always been great. Thanks to their Instant Recovery technology and its ability to power up any VM at any restore point directly from the backup file, it’s possible to have a VM up and running in few minutes without waiting for long restore times.
Depending on the license level, you would then be able to connect to the restored VM and get the data you need (standard license) or use one of the U-AIR recovery wizard to let Veeam do all these processes in the background and give you a simple interface to choose data and restore them (enterprise license).
That said, having to power on an entire Exchange Server, maybe even as a member of a DAG cluster, only to recover one lost email, has always been a bit overkill, and something classic agent-based competitor has always shown as a limit of Veeam.
No more.
Veeam has recently released a beta tool, called Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange. It’s goal? Right what it’s name stands for. The software needs to be installed on a 64 bit versions of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2, where also Veeam Backup and Replication is already installed. Other specifications are:
– you can use it only on Exchange 2010 servers
– you need Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1
– works for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V backups
– Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) binaries
– Outlook 2010 x64 on the Veeam server (needed to complete some restore tasks)
You can get ESE binaries directly from an Exchange 2010 installation DVD, simply search for the “ese.dll” file, copy it into the Veeam server and link to it under Veeam Explorer for Exchange options. This is the only file you need.
Once your setup is ready, first you need to run a File Level Recovery to mount the .EDB database from a backup set and make it visible inside the Veeam Backup server file structure. Then, inside Veeam Explorer you add the new EDB database:
From here, you can simply browse the database looking at the desired mailbox, its inbox, calendar or other elements, and even search for specific items if the mailbox is really large:
Once you find the items you need to restore, you can save them in MSG or PST format, ready to be then imported in the production Exchange server. Or, if you configured SMTP settings inside this tool, send the email directly to the owner’s inbox.
Cool, isn’t it?
And to add more coolness, Veeam already confirmed this tool will be added in the next major release at no additional charge. Think about the price of specialized software or backup add-on to do the same, and you can realize how much money you can save, and have at the same time a way to restore emails with ease and low time consumption.
If you want to test the tool yourself, I had some invitations from Veeam to give away. Click on this link!