How VMware iSCSI LUNS are Presented to Windows Server 2008 R2 Std

Question

Hi all,

I am hoping for some clarification. I have a Dell Equallogic PS400XV SAN and were using a windows server 2008 R2 std with backup EXEC 2010 R3 ith the VMware AVVI angent for backing up our VMware infrastructure.

I read that I should disable automount which had been done at the beginning of the project. Alot of people say that the disks will be shown in Win2008 Server Unknown and not initialized but all my VMware formatted LUNS are visable in the disk management and they even show the size of each LUN / on the windows server. I get poor backup performance and am trying to rule out everything I can.

Any info on if this is expected or if infact something bad has happened here would be interesting to know.

Thanks

Sylvester20007

SyLvEsTeR20007 · Answer

Hello Don,

Thanks for your help, that information is very useful in understanding the system.

First off, Our Company is small and I am the only person with access to said server as I am the only IT guy here.

I have only the SAN transport option in the VMware tab in BUE 2010R3 selected. The iSCSI link in on a dual port intel 1GB nic and I use flow control and jumbo accross the board, its enabled on the servers and SAN and switches.

You said in a perfect world, windows WOULD be able to read directly from VMFS, is this not the case? I simply dont understand why it should be slow to backup the VM, If I create a NTFS formatted lun on the SAN, I can benchmark it and hit 240MB/s over the two iSCSI links from the backup server. In effect, all BUE does is look at the attached LUN and create a snapshot and then copy the original VMDK file off the SAN to the backup archive on the Server (which in my case is on a Dell MD1000 DAS with 12 7200RPM 500GB HDDs with a read write speed over 200MB's sustained). Is there a way I can view the VM files on the san from windows and do a manual copy off the SAN to monitor the throughput?

Thanks

Jevon

EqualLogic

How VMware iSCSI LUNS are Presented to Windows Server 2008 R2 Std

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