How to test the integrity of an Exchange database?

I would like to verify the integrity of my Exchange 2010 database backups and could use some guidance.

We have an Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 server that we backup but I don't know if the backups are any good yet. Since I don't have the hardware beefy enough to install SBS again and practice a restore, I thought maybe I could simply export a backed up copy of the Exchange database to a USB drive and run some tool on it to verify that it passes integrity checks. Pointers on how to do this or something similar would be much appreciated.

You'll want to use ESEUtil. Not much has changed in it over the past 3 Exchange versions.

Here is one guide about how to use ESEUtil to do some basic database checks in Exchange 2010: http://msexchangeguru.com/2009/07/12/exchange-database-recovery-using-eseutil-commands/

For example, to run an integrity check on a database named priv1.edb located in D:\Restore, try:

ESEUTIL /G "D:\Restore\priv1.edb“

ISINTEG is designed especially to check integrity of Exchange stores, but I believe it only works on databases in a running Exchange system. ESEUtil only requires the database files.

You could restore the database to a recovery database and attempt to restore some items out of it. You can do this "live" on your existing server computer without disrupting production operations (though you may be soaking up a lot of your I/O bandwidth).