In earlier versions of Avamar, we were able to provision a "GLR Proxy" to be used to offload all Granular Level Restore (or Recovery) processes from the production Exchange farm to a standalone Exchange client. Doing so allowed free access to the GLR Proxy without inadvertently introducing a "performance hit" on the actual day-to-day operations of a customer's production Exchange environment.
Simply put, this GLR Proxy was another VM or physical Exchange server configured to work with, but not participate in, Exchange DAG operations. The Exchange VSS Plug-in required the target client to have Microsoft Exchange installed in order to allow installation of the plug-in and optional GLR plug-ins.
Starting with Avamar 7.5.101-101, the Exchange VSS plug-in was changed so that it no longer is required to be installed on a server running Microsoft Exchange. Consequently, it is now possible to configure a GLR Proxy for EMC ItemPoint on any Windows server or workstation in the same Active Directory Domain hosting a customer's Exchange application.
The Exchange VSS Plug-in installation still checks for an installation of Microsoft Exchange, but will allow the user installing the plug-in to click OK in order to continue with the installation of the plug-in. Once installation of the Exchange VSS Plug-in with (optional) EMC ItemPoint is complete, additional components must also be installed on the GLR Proxy in order to run Exchange GLR with EMC ItemPoint. Those components are:
- Exchange Management Tools (matching the version of Exchange installed on the customer's Exchange application)*
- Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT)
- IIS Manager 6.0 (This component is already present as a role on the operating system and must be enabled)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1/4.0 or above
- Outlook 2010 or 2013 (32 Bit)
- Outlook 2016 (32 Bit) may be used if your version of EMC ItemPoint is 8.3 or later. EMC ItemPoint 8.3 comes bundled with the Avamar Exchange VSS plug-in in Avamar 18.2 and later.
All other requirements for running EMC ItemPoint remain. See Dell EMC KB Article 489615.
Supported versions of Microsoft Exchange are Exchange 2010 through Exchange 2019.
Supported versions of Operating Systems are Windows Server 2008 R2 through Server 2019 as well as Windows 10.
Please note that because of updates and fixes being pushed by Microsoft to Windows 10 and Server 2016, these operating systems may be difficult or impossible to configure as a GLR Proxy for ItemPoint. This is due to the operating system on some versions prohibiting the execution of applications (e.g., the Avamar axionfs.exe process that creates the virtual mount point used during Exchange GLR) from remotely mounted folders or shares. Consequently, the best operating system to be used as a GLR Proxy would be Windows Server 2012.
Please also note that a GLR Proxy for ItemPoint does not need to be dedicated for that purpose. In other words, if the customer has an existing shared or "tool box" server in their environment, the Exchange GLR ItemPoint components can safely be installed on that client so long as the client meets all other requirements.
*The installation of Exchange Management Tools is required
only if the customer wishes to take advantage of the restore of required logs to local storage. Doing so may increase the I/O reads/writes as ItemPoint for Exchange is indexing and/or accessing Exchange logs during the recovery process within ItemPoint.
Because the database structures of Microsoft Exchange 2016 may not always be the same, if errors are encountered when opening EMC ItemPoint with an Exchange 2016 database as a Source, additional assistance may be required from OnTrack PowerControls Technical Support.