I just came across an article from VMWare on Raw Device Mappings that
states the following:
Raw device mapping makes it possible to run some SAN management agents
inside a virtual
machine. Similarly, any software that needs to access a device using raw
SCSI commands can be
run inside a virtual machine. This kind of software may be referred to
as "SCSI target based
software".
We are using VMWare ESX 2.5.1 with our FAS960c to store VMDK files.
We'd love the opportunity to better utilize VMWare and SnapMirror for DR
with SQL and other applications but because virtual machines see SAN
attached disk as local disk, tools such as SME, SMQ, SnapDrive and
SnapMirror won't work within a Windows virtual machine for block level
replications. I'm also not ready to base my VMWare DR off of a
shareware product like ESXRanger.
I'm aware of the NetApp article detailing hot, warm and cold snapshots
of VMWare volumes but none are realistic in a production environment.
Hot snapshots offer no guarantees of the snap being good and warm and
cold snaps require you to shut down the VM or ESX host respectively.
I'm not sure if this is new for version 2.5.2 but has anyone had any
luck running these tools on a Windows VM in VMWare?
Thanks,
John T. Johnson
Storage Architect
Faegre & Benson, LLP
JTJohnson(a)Faegre.com