Can somebody help me out with best practices for configuring the save devices as far as RAID type and SIZE! we are planning on having snaps taken for SAP Prod luns for daily backups.
The ideal SAV pool configuration is RAID1 protection with one SAV hyper on every spinning disk that you have the most of a specific type. So if you had 256 300GB FC drives and 128 SATA drives, I would create 128 SAV volumes only on the FC drives (256 RAID1 hypers).
The capacity should equal about 30% of the capacity of your source volumes, but could be more or less depending on the change rate over the life of the snap.
You want your SAV pool spread as widely as possible. Do not isolate it to a small number of drives.
Hello PGK and Happy New Year. One question? Shall those snaps devices be mapped to FAs all the time? Shall those snaps devices be masked to a mount host? Especially if the snaps are mapped from the beginning then you have to use FAs ports that are not utilized so much. If it is possible try to create a separate disk group for the physical drives and try those physical disks to be FC drives. If you are in DMX3 or DMX4 create the SAVE devices with 65520 cyls. Regarding RAID type it is better to create the SAVE devices as RAID1 and you will have better performance.
The VP Snap (really clones) can use the standard thin pool devices (TDATs) so there is no reason to make a seperate pool of devices. You can have your source and target using the same VP pool.
thank you for the information , we have 136(450GB) FC drives available and we need about 10TB of snap save space, i calculated taking 30% change of total storage allocated to sap servers ie 26TB.currently the default pool is raid5(3+1) and it has 40*8GB save devices.since our FC thinpool is oversubscribed we donot want to use all FC disks for snaps.
would it be good idea to create a seperate diskgroup with 32*450 FC disks giving us 432*.75 =10368GB for save pool and can we create 75GB save devices and add it to existing pool?
If you already have VP (thin pool) technology, you would be MUCH better off to simply use VP Snaps (space saving Clones) instead of the older traditional SNAPs which use SAV/VDEV devices. With VP snaps you don't have to have a seperate pool for your target devices.
If you insist on using SAV SNAPs, then U would add those 32 FC drives to your existing VP pool and then delete one TDAT from every drive and then change those to SAV devices. 32 disks isn't enough for a SAV pool.
we are at microcode version 5875.269.201. i thought you said we can use VP snaps only if we are at 5876 code!
why would i want to add 32 Fc drives to existing VP pool and delete one TDAT from every drive and change to save devices if i can just create save devices directly from disk group from what ever space left after creating TDATs.
Yes, but 76 code will be the target code level soon. Seems a lot of work when the new feature is just around the corner.
I thought you had a pool already in production. If not, then just make one hyper of SAV on every FC drive for your pool. Making them the same size as your TDATs may be good if you want to later go to VP SNAPs and turn them in to regular TDATs.
first of all i agreed with Quincy's last comment. It is the ideal scenario that you can do regarding Snaps and VP Snaps at 5876 microcode.
Also, because i had implemented my Snaps on DMX4 on 5773 microcode and now at VMAX on 5875, i have created 8 hypers/slices per disk on 300GB 15K FC Disk.
Of course the BE controllers, the TDATs and physical disks where the SNAPS are reside are more or less 80% utilized, but does not create any performance issues to the box or to the others applications.
This is point of view, but for sure i would follow Quincy's advise if i had 5876 on the VMAX.
Quincy561
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Posted January 3rd, 2013 10:00
The ideal SAV pool configuration is RAID1 protection with one SAV hyper on every spinning disk that you have the most of a specific type. So if you had 256 300GB FC drives and 128 SATA drives, I would create 128 SAV volumes only on the FC drives (256 RAID1 hypers).
The capacity should equal about 30% of the capacity of your source volumes, but could be more or less depending on the change rate over the life of the snap.
You want your SAV pool spread as widely as possible. Do not isolate it to a small number of drives.