Hi Daniel,
That's correct. During the VCS Exchange Setup wizard, there is a point where the wizard needs to mount the Information Store on a DR node. The wizard manages this by getting SnapDrive to break-off SnapMirror and perform a single file snap restore from the last consistent snapshots of your exchange LUNs. This in turn makes your DR LUNs writeable and hence the Exchange IS can mount.
It's this process that will likely timeout and fail unless you're patched up to SnapDrive 3.2R1 and the VCS private here - http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/281668.htm - I'd let support know you've applied the private to keep their records straight.
My comment about the resource dependencies really only applies AFTER you've got Exchange highly-available under VCS control through the setup wiz. You'll see in the sample resource dependency tree (page 123 of the "VCS for NetApp SnapMirror Installation and Configuration Guide for Microsoft Exchange" - http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/277937.htm) - that SnapMirror depends on SnapDrive.
As you've rightly said, the resources set this way will perform an SFSR. In a DR scenario where your source filers are unavailable because of a site outage this is desirable as the SFSR will break the mirror, make the vol writeable, roll you back to your last verified snapshot and mount it. That's great (although SFSRs take a hideously long time to complete).
If however like us, you want the capability to perform an administrative failover to your DR site and subsequently failback without data loss, reverse the dependencies so SnapDrive depends on SnapMirror. In this instance the SnapMirror agent breaks the mirror, resyncs the data, reverses the mirror and makes your original source filer the mirror destination. SnapDrive onlines next in the resource tree and simply mounts the now writeable LUN (rather than mess about with an SFSR). You're looking at a tenth of the time to recover and zero data-loss versus the pain of an SFSR and data loss back to your last consistent snap.
Basically VCS is doing this - http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel7001_gf/html/ontap/onlinebk/mirror22.htm (you'll need a NOW account to get to this, if you haven't, I'll mail it.)
