While attending Tech Ed 2012 EMEA I spoke with some people @ the Veeam booth. They showed me a beta version of the Veeam Explorer for Exchange. I was very enthusiastic about it and after a few week of holiday I finally had some time to do a review for myself.
What does Veeam Explorer do?
Veeam Explorer makes it possible to restore single mailbox items from the Exchange database (EDB + logfiles). Everyone knows the tool no system administrator can live with out, Ontrack Powercontrols. I’ve used that tool several times, but there is one major drawback. It’s licensed on a exchange server name. So for consultants and companies with multiple exchange servers it’s not that handy. Although there are more companies and products who work just fine they all cost money. And Veeam Explorer for Exchange (VEFE for now) will also be available in a free version!
Also very nice, VEFE doesn’t need any agents. Just point to an exchange ese.dll and you mailbox edb file and the logfiles and off you go. You can dropdown your mailbox database and scroll through all the mailboxes and their items. You can even directly open all the items (mails etc)
Installation of Veeam Explorer for Exchange
Installation of VEFE is very easy. Make sure you have Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 x64 installed!
Screendumps
First point to an Exchange Server installation (ese.dll). This can be an unc path.
Then I restored an back-up of my Exchange 2010 Server database
Fill in the location of the Exchange database file(s) and the logfiles
Wait a couple of seconds
And the database is connected
Now scroll through the items and these are the options
Conclusion
Although the product is still in beta, it works very nice. I was surprised about the speed of the program. Other programs like Ontrack Powercontrols also work very nice but their performance is not that great. It takes ages to scroll to several mailboxes to find the message you are looking for. VEFE works very quickly. Ofcourse it depends on the hardware (storage!) but using my whitebox environment and several tens of gigabytes of mailbox data the performance was top of the line!
There is room for improvement also, 
The VEFE is an standalone program and is not yet integrated in Veeam Backup and Recovery. Although it’s not necessary, it could be nice. Another feature I would like to see in the final version is the possibility to restore items directly in an other mailbox store. Yes, now you can forward the message of export to pst. But a direct restore would be better, the items are untouched then also.
Try it for yourself
Veeam offers the possibility to test the beta product.
Therefore go to the veeam website (www.veeam.com) and register for the beta.
Don’t you want to wait to be selected? I have a few invites. Want to receive one? Leave a comment!