We have our exchange 2007 store and logs on a NetApp filer. The filer presents two separate drives using iscsi one for logs on for mail store.We are replacing the current filer with a new one. Rather than mounting the new filer as a new volume, creating a new storage group and then moving all of the mailboxes, I was thinking we could replicate the data from the old filer to the new filer using NetApp's built in replication. If we do that and then present the new filer with the same drive letter etc, and then stop and restart the store , will this work? Are there any issues that could occur with this method? Does anyone have any experience with doing it this way?

Do you have NetApps' SnapMirror feature? You could SnapMirror your production LUNs on to the target system. Then, right before you get ready to switch over, shutdown all Exchange services and perform one last SnapMirror of your production LUNs. This will make sure the databases are consistent. Then, disconnect the LUNs from the old Filer and connect the LUNs on the new Filer and use the same drive letters. I don't know the actual mechanics of doing this on the NetApp side, so I'm not sure this is a "best practice", but this seems like it would prevent you from having to copy a lot of data. Jim McBee - Blog - http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com

mbaugh said: We have our exchange 2007 store and logs on a NetApp filer. The filer presents two separate drives using iscsi one for logs on for mail store.We are replacing the current filer with a new one. Rather than mounting the new filer as a new volume, creating a new storage group and then moving all of the mailboxes, I was thinking we could replicate the data from the old filer to the new filer using NetApp's built in replication. If we do that and then present the new filer with the same drive letter etc, and then stop and restart the store , will this work? Are there any issues that could occur with this method? Does anyone have any experience with doing it this way?I don't personally administer the NetApp filers we have but you are correct in assuming you can copy the data to the new filer and present those LUNs to the server as the same drive letter or mount point and Exchange will not no the difference.Just take the stores offline, disconnect LUNs from snapdrive, migrate data to new filer, reconnect LUNs via snapdrive and remount stores.Sr. Exchange Engineer - Constellation Energy

Many thanks for your ideas. I spoke to Mark Arnold - another mvp who is also a netapp engineer. We do have snapmirror . The plan we discussed, which we will go ahead and run through in our test environment is as Jim outlined. It is NetApps' best practice for doing this and all of the steps are outlined in the latest NetApps Snap Manager for Exchange 5.0 admin guide. Once again many thanks for your suggestions. It is greatly appreciated