I've not yet contacted ARCserve support but that's a valid suggestion.

I have found this old document from 20o5/2006 describing transportable hardware-based VSS snapshot backups for ARCserve r11.1 and Windows 2003:

eqlsupport.dell.com/.../DownloadAsset.aspx

Depending on the Windows and ARCserve licenses, it should be possible.

According to CA support EqualLogic does not have a VSS writer for Windows files which is needed for the transportable snapshot to function.

We checked on a fileserver (vssadmin command) with the latest HIT KIT installed and no EqualLogic VSS writer is shown.

Is CA correct?

Yes, the EqualLogic provider is there but there is no specific writer ('vssadmin list writers').

Again, this is the issue according to CA support.

Is there any way I can put CA and Dell EqualLogic support in contact with each-other to get this sorted and maybe the pdf document I linked to updated?

I'm using Arcserve 16.5 with a PS6000E and HIT v4.6. I have a series of scripts that create scheduled snapshots on a file server, then mount those snapshots on the backup server. After the snapshots are taken, the file server is not involved.

Do you want a copy of them?

I 2nd that.  I would much appreciate if you can share those scripts.

Yes, I'm very interested in those scripts. Could you post them in the thread or upload them somewhere? Or email them to me at '<ADMIN NOTE: Email id removed as per privacy policy>' ?

I asked CA support to email me their response to this issue, this is their response:

"Further to our discuss, VSS HW snapshot provider can only to transportable
snapshots when its working with Writers, without writers (for file system
VSS backup) the provider acts like a Software provider and doesn't create
a transportable snapshot.
At this time, CA ARCserve Backup supports transportable backup and restore
of the Microsoft Exchange Writer, MSDE Writer, Microsoft SQL Server Writer,
and Microsoft Hyper-V Writer."

Not sure what to make of that but it looks like they only support the mentioned applications (Exchange etc) and Windows file shares are not supported by ARCserve at this point.

As suggested by Don I'll make a support call with Dell an mention my support case number with CA.

For CDNEqualLogic and people that are using transportable snapshots in Backup Exec:

do you see a considerable throughput increase compared to traditional backup?

I opened a call with EqualLogic support. They state that ARCserver is no longer a supported application and have no interest in contacting CA/ACRserve support to get things sorted and update the old support document that I linked to in one of the first post.

In the mean time I'm eagerly awaiting CDNEqualLogic's custom scripts :-)

I'd also be extremely interested in seeing those scripts as well. I've got a PowerShell script (based around commands show in Dell's document TR1089) that goes through all the necessary actions of creating and mounting a snapshot on the Windows 2008 R2 ARCserve server, but when I try to pul out the disk ID from the WMI information it sends back 4294967295 (2^32 - 1) instead of the correct value of 5. That's the one thing that's stopping me from taking my backup load off our file servers.

I forgot to mention in my previous post that when I type the exact same commands in directly to a PowerShell window it returns the correct disk ID.