Hello,

Ill go though our situation and then what our issue is as Dell support could not help us.  We have SC9000's, all firmware up to date...

We have several large SQL DB's in the 15-20tb range EACH. These DB's are connected to VMware via RDM. We are the using Dell Replay Manager on those servers to initiate APP Consistent snapshots all day of the DB Lun. This is working fine.

BUT, we cannot find a backup solution out there that will or can backup an RDM, i have tested too many to count. We also CANNOT do a traditional type of backup that uses the VMware snapshot as that causes our DB to crawl and affect users with the millions of transactions going on. There are backup solutions that can initiate san snapshots and backup the luns OFFHOST, not affecting the guest VM which is what we need, but that requires the data to be in VMDK format, not an RDM. 

Heres are our issue. Dell Replay manager ONLY works with RDM's, not VMDKs and the traditional san consistent snaps only work 10% of the time for recovery. We use VMware SRM for recovery and NEED Application consistent snaps for that work, as the San snaps are our 1st recovery point then backups are 2nd.

We need the Luns to be VMDK and get app consistent snaps.  Have you actually TESTED a standard San consistent snap if it mounts? It fails 90% of the time, Replay Manager works 100% of the time.  

What is everyone out there doing for backups? For app consistent snaps?