Stellar Exchange Toolkit Overview

If you have worked long enough in IT you will have already had that dreaded call. Users are reporting that they can't access something. Very few incidents however are worse then the dreaded 'Our email is down' especially when it is through out the organization.

It is absolutely critical for anyone who works with email to be able to a recovery in any situation. When working with Microsoft Exchange Server, unfortunately the tools from Microsoft leave a lot to be desired with a OST converter unavailable and dumping the email database to PST files requiring a functional Exchange Server (sort of defeats the purpose if the server is down and you need access to the emails). With this in mind I will be doing a comprehensive review of the Stellar Phoenix Exchange Toolkit.

Lab Setup

For the purpose of this review, I have setup a lab as following:
A domain controller with the following

• Intel i5 2400 3.1 Ghz
• 16 GB RAM
• 2 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD in RAID 1 configuration
• Windows Server 2016 Standard Server Core-Configured as DC

A Exchange Server with the following

•  Intel Xeon E5-2430 @ 2.20 GHZ (2 Proccessors)
• 32 GB RAM
• 4 600 GB SAS Drives configured as RAID 10
• Windows Server 2016 Standard With Desktop Experience
• Exchange Server 2016 Standard

Two  Workstations with the following

• Intel i5 2400 3.1 Ghz
• 16 GB RAM
• 512 GB Samsung 860 EVO SSD
• Windows 10 Enterprise (x64)
• Office 2016 (x86)

***Note, all computers configured are physical machines. Virtualization has not been used in this lab.

 A standard Exchange Server install has been done. 100 users and mailboxes were created with the Create-TestUsers PowerShell script. I have also used Paul Cunningham's Start-MailGen PowerShell script for 7 days to create a massive amount of mail flow.

Stellar Exchange Toolkit

Part One-Overview

 The Stellar Exchange Toolkit consists of five different programs

1. Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery 
2. Stellar Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Server
3. Stellar OST to PST Converter
4. Stellar Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Backup
5. Stellar Phoenix Password Recovery for Microsoft Exchange.

Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery

Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery can recover corrupted  EDB files and restore the data  including emails, attachments, contacts, calendars, tasks  and journals.
Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery can also recover email and attachments from corrupt EDB files and save them as PST, MSG, EML, HTML, RTF and PDF format.

One of the interesting things about Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery is that it supports all versions of Exchange Server, back to 5.5 days! (That's March 1997, back in the Windows 95 days!)

Stellar Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Server

Stellar Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Server is similar to Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery as it converts mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange database files into  PST  files.  Stellar Mailbox Extractor also works with both online and offline Exchange databases (EDB). Previewing the mailboxes is also available.

As well, Stellar Mailbox Extractor also supports all versions of Exchange Server, back to 5.5

Stellar OST to PST Converter

Stellar OST to PST Converter converts OST files to PST files as well as DBX and MBOX format (and MSG, EML, RTF, PDF, HTML) , plus many other formats. It is important to note that the folder structure of the original OST file is preserved with this program when converting to PST

Stellar Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Backup

Stellar Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Backup will extract mailboxes from Exchange databases . Where this version differs from the other two extractors is that this one can access the mailboxes directly from a VHDx or BKF files. This can be really handy as you don't have to restore the backups first.

Stellar Phoenix Password Recovery for Microsoft Exchange.

While Stellar Phoenix Password Recovery for Microsoft Exchange is branded as an Exchange product, it is more for Windows Servers in general than Exchange servers. What Stellar Phoenix Password Recovery does is reset passwords on servers. It can reset passwords on domain controllers as well as member servers.

The Manual

This where things get interesting, the manual itself is fully illustrated. All five programs are independently documented here. One thing to note is that the documentation does not refer to itself, that is you don't need to know how one program works in order to use another one. This is actually very good, I wish more companies would use this approach.