Add Windows 2003 host to Storage Groups

One problem:  Windows 2003.  In this scenario, if the LUNs are made visible to BKSERVER, it will try and write a disk signature to the drives.  That means that BKSERVER is also able to write to the LUNs.  This is generally not a good thing, without a cluster-aware filesystem.

How about presenting a snapshot of the LUNs via SnapView instead?

Search Powerlink for "EMC CLARiion SnapView Snapshots and Snap Sessions Knowledgebook - A Detailed Review".  It will give you good information on using Snapshots in this regard.  Does this help?

Thanks Karl for your very helful response.  I am unfamiliar with SnapView.  I can see that SnapView had already been installed on this CX4-240, so I'll read up on SnapView and try it out.

When taking a snapshot of a particular LUNs, is it correct that it should it be done during the lowest I/O time?

To get the hang of it, you might want to try the Snapshot Wizard in Navisphere Manager.  It will walk through the steps to create LUNs for the Reserve LUN Pool (RLP), create and name a session and so on.

If you have multiple LUNs for your VMDK files, you can create a multi-LUN session and snap multiple LUNs at once for your backups.  This guide gives a good overview and introduces a few points of consideration as well.

Keep us up to date with your progress - be sure to ask more questions in the forums: there are more knowledgeable folks than I who can give you many more specifics.

Thanks!

Thanks for your suggestion, Dynamox.

I've the VMware Option enabled in the BackupExec v2010, and BackupExec v2010 backs up Virtual Machines via its built-in VCB feature, so I did not need to have a separate VCB server.  However, backing up a large VMDK file (~300 GB) can take a long while to complete over 1 GB backbone.  The backup server has a 4-Gb HBA and I am trying to determine if I can backup the virtual machines via the fiber connection between the server running the backup sofware and the EMC SAN.

Are you backing up virtual machines in your environment?  If you do, what software do you use?

Thanks.

Thanks very much Glen for your response.   Those links are very helpful.    After reading both Snapshots and Clones, I am leaning toward Cloning for less of I/O peformance impact, but I am not sure how long it would take to create and synchronize a 800GB LUN combined of 2 different LUNs.

Thanks.

have you looked into VCB ? That is the safest and supported way to do what you are trying to do.

your VMs will be crashed consistent,  as if somebody pull the power plug on them. If you want OS consistency look at VCB

http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/consolidated_backup.html

In the documents section on this forum, you can find most of the Best Practice guides - for Snaps see:

CLARiiON SnapView Snapshots and Snap Sessions Knowledgebook—A Detailed Review.pdf

White Paper: EMC CLARiiON Snap Clones - A Detailed Review

You should also review the Best Practices for the version of Flare running on your array - that is also located in the Documents section:

EMC CLARiiON Performance and Availability Release 29.0 Firmware Update Applied Best Practices.pdf

glen

We are ..but at the guest level right now (using Avamar) . Looking at Veeam Backup for VMDK level backups.

300GB for a VMDK is pretty huge - if it was an RDM you could snap it  and mount the disk directly to the BE server (assuming it is a WINDOWS VM).  I use Replication Manager to schedule the snaps/mounts for backups and the BE agent to grab the OS backup.  RM can quiesce NTFS volumes, SQL Server, Oracle, and a lot of other things to get a consistent copy of the data.  Having all of the data in a VMDK is nice because it is one "unit" but if you are sharing that LUN with other ESX servers with lots of VMDKs on it you may get reduced performance due to the disk being passed back and forth between the ESX servers...then again if your workload is medium to light you would probably never notice the difference.

Also, I don't know if this is true with 2010 (haven't upgraded yet) but in 12.5 Vmware backups were a B2D2T operation - meaning it copies the VMDK to temporary storage and then pushes it to tape.  Restores require this same temporary storage if you are trying to pull a single file out of the VMDK (see Granular Restore Technology to see the requirements).

Dan

Thanks Dan for your input. Unfortunately, I don't have Replication Manager option installed yet, but I'll ask to see if possible to add it to next year's budget. For now, my backup option of VMDKs is limitted - SnapClone or SnapShot the LUNs to do the backup manually can be a real pain.

I didn't use BE12.5 so I don't know if backing up VMs have the similar options.  I had looked at VEEM in the past and it's simplest app. to install and use among others like Acronis, VizionCore.  The draw-back was that it didn't have the option to back up directly to tape for offsite storage - which we are required to do so at my current company.