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June 26th, 2013 09:00
Issues With Mounting SnapShots And Cloned Volumes To A Different Windows Server
Hello,
Wondering whether anyone could help. You'll have to excuse me as I'm fairly new to the Dell Equalogic so my terminology might be slight inacurate.
We currently have a physical Windows 2003 server which has a number of volumes provided to it by the Equalogic over SCSI connections. We want to move the data from these individual drives across to a Windows 2008 server running on VMWare using iSCSI initiator connections (not as VMDK files). We would like to move this data across quickly and easily and if possible without having to take the 2003 server offline.
So on the Equalogic we have made a clone copy of one of the existing volumes used by the 2003 server and given the Windows 2008 server access to this via it's iSCSI initiator. When we go into Disk Management and refresh the drives on the Windows 2008 server, it can see this "cloned" volume but when I look at it in Windows Explorer, I'm unable to access the contents of the drive "get access denied" message and I also can't see the properties showing the total drive size, number of files etc.
We've also tried the same but with a snaphot of the volume on the Equalogic. Although the Windows 2008 server can see the snapshot as a drive in Disk Management, again we are unable to access it's contents or volume properties in Windows Explorer.
We thought this may be an issue with Windows 2008 (as the volume is current used by a Windows 2003 server) but if we assign both the cloned volume and snapshot to another Windows 2003 server we have the same issue.
If we assign the cloned volume and snaphot to the original 2003 server from which they were made, it can see these fine and we can browse their contents fine.
Therefore it appears to us that snapshots and cloned volumes can only be successfully mounted and accessable on the server from which they were originally created. Is this the case or should we be able to mount a cloned volume or snapshot on any other Windows server ?
Thanks
Mark
Joe S586
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729 Posts
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June 26th, 2013 10:00
A few things to check, go to the snapshot in the Group manager, and look at the settings
Make sure the snapshot is read-write
Make sure you have assigned the access control list to the host IP (or initiator name or chap) for the host you want to connect to the snapshot.
Make sure the snapshot is online.
-joe
Joe S586
7 Technologist
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729 Posts
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June 26th, 2013 11:00
For the second part of your question, regarding having the VM Win2k8 connecting directly to the EqualLogic volume (not part of a VMFS), you would need to setup in VMware what is known as “Storage Direct”.
This is a typically two Virtual Machine port groups, with two physical NICs (on the iSCSI network), a virtual NIC for each VM portgroup/physical NIC being used, and uses the iSCSI initiator on the guest OS (a.k.a. the Microsoft iSCSI initiator).
Created a new vSwitch with two dedicated physical NICs on the iSCSI network
Create two VM portgroups like EQL_SD1 and EQL_SD2
Modify each portgroup, as follows:
1. On the vSwitch Properties-> EQL_SD1 > Edit> NIC Teaming.
2. Select “Override switch failover order”
3. Select VMNIC2 and use the “Move Down” button to move it from Active to Standby.
4. Repeat the process for “EQL_SD2”, move VMNIC1 from Active to Standby in that case.
So you end up with each port group having only one active and one standby, each opposite of the other.
On the settings for the Guest OS, add the network adaptor for the portgroups your created
In the VM guest OS, configure the Storage Direct adaptors each with an IP address on the iSCSI subnet, and connect to the volume with the iSCSI initiator.
-joe