Exchange 2007 in a VMDK - Snapshotting?

[-DZ-]

I have a small Exchange Server 2007 that we are evaluating. When I say small, I mean it's hosting four mailboxes This was originally a physical server, but we did a P2V and ended up with the VMDK.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to get a snapshot of this and get it replicated to our remote datacenter.

We have two clustered Dell 2950's at each datacenter all running ESX 3.0.2, each connected to a Compellent SAN with replication possible between the two SANs. VirtualCenter 2.5 controls it all.

Our SAN vendor offers a component to allow SAN level snapshots of Exchange server, but I believe this only works for RDMs and not VMDK files.

I'm thinking it's possible to write a script to shut down the Exchange services and take down the information store at two in the morning, take the snapshot, and then bring everything back up. Then I'm thinking I would have to take a SAN snapshot of the volume hosting the Exchange VMDK and replicate that snapshot to the other SAN to present to the remote ESX servers.

Am I making this too complicated or is this what I'm stuck with doing running Exchange in the VMDK file?

[ctfoster]

Since you are interested in moving a 'point-in-time' snapshot across to your DR site for recovery perposes you could look at the problem more as a backup/recovery process rather than a LUN replication. This simplifies things a great deal and there are a number of products on the market that can help you. From my experience you could use esXpress to create delta files on each snapshot and ftp these to remote site - to be reapplied and refresh up the base vmdk. If each snapshot was linked to a pre-freeze script to unmount the store you could be pretty confident that the image at the remote site will be consistant. Only a compressed set of block delta changes would move across the link so it would be quite efficient.