NetWorker 19.7 Snapshot Management Integration Guide

Intelligent pairing

Intelligent pairing is a NetWorker feature that automatically chooses an available mirror LUN, based on the mirror that is the least expensive to synchronize with the source LUN.

Intelligent pairing selects only mirrors that are visible and usable by the snapshot mount host, which can be separate from the application host. This feature eliminates the potential error in manual configuration, which can have new LUNs masked only to the application host when they should also be masked to the mount host.

Intelligent pairing is now user configurable. Use the NSM_SNAP_SG client resource attribute. Add this attribute manually to the client resource after you create the client. Using the NSM_SNAP_SG client resource attribute increases performance and the number of LUNs are reduced.

Intelligent pairing selects mirror LUNs from a pool of LUNs that you specify in a VMAX storage group (NsrSnapSG) on each VMAX array that NetWorker uses:

• Each storage group can contain a maximum of 4096 LUNs.
• This storage group can contain any type of LUN, except source LUNs.
• Ensure that you add sufficient numbers, types, and sizes of devices to a storage group so that intelligent pairing can find compatible pairs. For example, for Clone and VP Snap operations, a source LUN requires the use of STD or BCV devices as mirrors.
• If NetWorker cannot find a valid mirror, then the snapshot fails with the following message:

  Not enough resources.