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November 3rd, 2010 15:00

ASM/VE Smart Copy Restore

I have ASM/VE installed on vCenter server virtual machine (vSphere 4.1).

I create a smart copy of a VM from a VMFS datastore that contains multiple VMs. The smart copy gets created very quickly. I can restore the VM from the smart copy successfully however, just restoring a VM from the smart copy takes what seems forever (20GB about an hour or so)…is this normal?

My second issue is when the smart copy has finished restoring my Equallogic group manager event log gets hundreds of messages from each host (4) indicating that “iscsi login to target (targetname) from initiator (host) failed for the following reason: Requested target not found”

So basically I have to go into vCenter configuration on each host. Go to the storage adapters, select the HBA properties and remove the reference to the target listed under the Static Discovery tab.

Is there someway to prevent this from occurring?

November 8th, 2010 16:00

The restore process requires the creation of a snapshot., it then has to be imported into vCenter. It's that whole process that takes time. The array side function is done very quickly.

Re: Adapter. That's an artifact on the Qlogic HBAs. They store all discovered targets in NVRAM. The card tries to attach/re-attach to all discovered targets. When you delete a volume/clone/snapshot, you have to remove them from the card. ESX doesn't do it for you. The SW iSCSI initiator does not suffer that problem.

Regards,

Don

2 Posts

November 9th, 2010 07:00

Thanks for your input on this as I wasn't sure what to expect in the first place.

November 9th, 2010 08:00

You are most welcome.

Sometimes I have found it faster to manually restore the VM, especially if I'm just copying the whole VMDK file. Also, using the manual method you can restore a single file from a VM. You mount the snapshot and use the ESX VI GUI to copy the (cut-n-paste), the VMDK file from the snapshot back to the source location. Or add that snapshot VMDK to another VM. Then you can look inside the VMDK and see the files. Then a simple copy at the VM level will get your files back.

-don
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