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SMVI Experiances
by Raj Patel 13 Nov '09

13 Nov '09

Hi all, Now our controller upgrade woes have been sorted I can start to play with the new stuff on our 2050. One of those is SMVI. Unfortunately as we're not on vSphere (and our ESX hosts aren't up to 3.5 update 4) we'll be sticking with v 1.2 of SMVI until we upgrade our ESX infrastructure to v4. Anyone out there willing to share their experiances with SMVI ? It looks fairly simple to configure and get going but just as I was about to schedule a few backup jobs I thought I'd trawl the net to find out if there are any 'gotchas'. For example we use iSCSI - will the VM grind to a halt (ie queisce) while the Volume is snapped (ie is there a performance hit) or is this a momentary operation (ie safe to do during the day) ? I have seen the note about snapping a VM with iSCSI attached LUN's - I can live with that (not sure about the DBA's . . .). For Prod we tend to put a 300Gb VMFS lun in a 500Gb flexvol - rate of change is generally pretty minimal for the app servers (generally w2k3 or w2k8 servers from templates). Is this a workable ratio or do I need to allocate more space (I'm looking at just a once a day snap with a 1 or 2 day retention) ? Thanks in advance, Raj.

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Determining the current 'snapmirror throttle' value?
by John Stoffel 13 Nov '09

13 Nov '09

Guys, Does anyone know how to determine what the current setting of 'snapmirror throttle N destination' actually is? I've tried looking at the output of: snapmirror status -l snapmirror throttle We're looking to dynamically throttle and un-throttle connections, and it would be nice to confirm what the actual setting is without have to guess and just set the value blindly. We're running 7.2.6.1 and moving to 7.3.1.1 soon, or something newer. Thanks, John John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec john.stoffel(a)taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087

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Determining the current 'snapmirror throttle' value?
by John Stoffel 10 Nov '09

10 Nov '09

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Determining the current 'snapmirror throttle' value?
by John Stoffel 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

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Determining the current 'snapmirror throttle' value?
by John Stoffel 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

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SnapDrive 6 & Windows 2008 - can't see or connect disks in SD but can see them in Disk Management MMC - only mount read-only
by Raj Patel 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

Hi, Another question - I have a datawarehouse box - has 4 luns -> SD 6.1 and Server 2k8 both 64bit. I can't seem to reconnect the LUN's using the SD wizard - however they do end up appearing in the Server Disk Management MMC. Catch is they will only mount read-only (but at least the data is fine). In iSCSI session management it will see the connected LUN's related to the igroup. One of two things tends to happen - if I try to use SD I either get a 120 sec time out or I get an error about the lun already being mapped (presumably by the built in iSCSI initiator). As per a previous post - this box was fine until a controller/ontap upgrade. I've tried zapping the igroup and mappings on the SAN and removing all traces from SD and the MS iSCSI initiator but I can't seem to overcome this problem. Any ideas ? Worst case I can carve off a whole new set of LUN's and move the data but I really don't want to have to do that if I don't have to. Thanks in advance, Raj.

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Controller upgrade complete but . . .
by Raj Patel 07 Nov '09

07 Nov '09

Hi all, Hoping you can save me some legwork - We've upgraded our 270c to a 2050ha - data looks good. We did run into the lun signaturing issue with VMWare but forewarned we were able to place the old sigs back onto the luns. My biggest hassle is that the Windows boxes with iSCSI attached LUN's appear to have lost their luns (ie SQL & Exchange). So the IQN string changed - we set it back to what it should be - but SnapDrive appears to have lost its drive mappings and the SAN lost its iSCSI initiator groups (luckily we can put them back manually from previous autosupports). So wondering a couple of things 1. whats the fastest way to get SnapDrive to remember its luns (even the MS iSCSI initiator seems to know what it thinks it should be seeing but SD 6 has lost all its config) ? I know I can manually re-connect them all but with DBA's and Exchange Admins having weird and wonderful drive mappings this is going to be time-consuming. 2. why did the SAN lose its initiator group config (across all luns and including chap security for our dmz esx servers) and why did SnapDrive lose its config (ie the SAN it connects to, the luns, igroup and drive mappings) as a result of a controller and ontap upgrade ? Next time I'll be sure to screenshot every lun mapping in Windows but surely I shouldn't need to do this ? Any post-upgrade tips to make my Sunday reconnecting systems a little more pleasant will be gratefully received. Cheers, Raj.

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RE: SMVI / VMWare Experiences...
by Ken Williams 03 Nov '09

03 Nov '09

Sounds like whatever user-defined script you have is failing sometimes? Or perhaps it's a VMWare tools issue. We've been able to track our issue down to the Guest OS level (win2k3 specifically). Looks like its an issue with VSS or LUN alignment. I would recommend ensuring your LUNs are aligned (use the VMWare host util kit, mbrscan / mbralign). There is detailed documentation on the NOW.netapp.com site. -----Original Message----- From: Nick Silkey [mailto:nick@silkey.org] Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 7:15 PM To: Ken Williams Cc: toasters(a)mathworks.com Subject: Re: SMVI / VMWare Experiences... Ken -- We too are experiencing issues with SMVI 1.2 bombing out when attempting to perform a VMware quiesce snap on _some_ RHEL5.3 32-bit VMs. A couple of notables: - These problematic VMs have a 100% success rate at taking VMware quiesce snaps within vCenter, independent of SMVI. - The problem is 100% reproducible during night, day, etc. - We will deploy several VMs at a crack, all the same build. When the next SMVI schedule hits, some fail while others succeed. Bizarre. - Over time (weve been experiencing this issue for several weeks now), the 'problem' VMs change. Example: VMs abc and xyz will fail for days; without intervention, VM abc will stop failing while VM xyz continues to fail ... even if theyre part of the same deploy base template/kickstart. - We are nowhere near our snap limit on the volumes. - These problematic VMs only bomb when attempting a quiesce. Non-quiesce SMVI snaps work like a champ. Been working with NetApp and VMware for some time now. Were at ESX 3.5u4+ to an 3160-R5 @ 7.2.6.1P3 via NFS + vCenter 4.0 + synch SnapMirror to another 3160-R5 @ 7.2.6.1P3. The only thing revealing is SMVI + vCenter logs of "cannot create a quiesced snapshot because the (user-supplied) custom prefreeze script in the virtual machine exited with a nonzero return code". -- Nick On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Ken Williams <kwillia(a)smud.org> wrote: > I'm looking for some experiences people out there may have with SMVI > with NetApp. We're currently experiencing major issues with SMVI > snapshots failing. I've had open tickets with NetApp/VMWare/Microsoft > for 3 months and still have yet to have a solution. > > My environment looks like such: > > 6 x HP DL380 G5 (32gb Ram) in a ESX Cluster Dual Emulex 10000 Cards in > each host. > Cisco MDS SAN > Netapp FAS3070 Cluster ~9tb aggregate for VMWare. > VMFS Datastores ~10-15 VMs per datastore. ~50gb per VM. > ASIS Turned on > Volume and LUNspace reservation turned off OnTap 7.2.5.1 Windows 2003 > Guest OS. > > I cant see us reaching any limitation on the Filers or the SAN. Yet we > have random VMs failing snapshots every night. Are other people seeing > these issues? (I've gone through the gamut of troubleshooting, version > management of ESX/VMWareTools/etc). Snapshots timeout and fail at the > VMWare/Guest level, not at the Netapp snapshot level. > > We want to have SMVI function with VSS enabled. > > Has anyone had failing snapshots been able to resolve a similar issue? > Or does anyone have SMVI working properly that we could use as a > reference to compare configuration? > > __________________________________________________________ > Ken Williams > Storage Administrator, Business Technology Operations Sacramento > Municipal Utility District > E-Mail: kwillia(a)smud.org > Phone: (916) 732-6744 > Cell: (916) 240-4213

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SUMMARY: trouble accessing nfs .snapshot dirs via cifs shares
by Romeo Theriault 02 Nov '09

02 Nov '09

Hi Everyone, First off I'd like to thank everyone whom wrote back to me privately with some suggestions on how to fix this issue. (Original question at bottom of message.) Though I'm glad people wrote to me privately I wish they would reply back to the mailing list as well as I often find answers to questions I have in mailing list archives. I also wanted to write back to say that I finally have gotten the issue resolved, though after having spent way too much time on it. (Netapp support was seemingly unable to help me resolve this issue.) Kudo's to Nick Bernstein for having a suggestion which was very close to the actual fix. Though I must admit that I didn't think his suggestion was close to the issue I was having and thus didn't look into much until the very end of my research. (A.K.A. a lot of wasted time on my part :( ) Here is Nicks response: When you first access a volume over nfs, it does a create/convert > unicode on the volume. Snapshots are read-only, so they can't have the > same conversion applied. This is normally the cause when you can > access the normal volume, but not the snapshots for it. Once new snaps > are taken you should be able to access the new ones. > The fix to the "Access Denied" error when trying to access a snapvault destination qtree with unix security via cifs is to set the options convert_ucode and create_ucode to on *before* you initiate the snapvault relationship with "snapvault start" otherwise the qtree is created without the unicode encoding and since the snapvault dest. is read only changing the ucode options after the qtree is created doesn't help and thus you have no access to any of your data (including new snapshots) via cifs, though nfs access is still fine. Hope this helps someone save some time in the future. What eventually tipped me off was this knowledgebase article, which is written for snapmirror but is similiar enough to the issue that I was having with snapvault that I was able to figure it out. https://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb23656 Romeo Original Question: On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 11:32 PM, Romeo Theriault <romeotheriault(a)gmail.com>wrote: > Hello, We have a VMware environment with nfs as the transport protocol. > What I'm testing out is snapvaulting the vmware datastores to another filer > and then creating cifs shares on the snapvaulted volumes (qtrees), so the > windows client vm's can access their vmdk files to restore files. I should > state that I'm a newbie to cifs on the netapps as we are a unix shop. But, I > have the snapvault setup all working. Where I'm running into problems is > accessing the directories in the shares when I map a drive in windows to the > share. > > I configured cifs to authenticate against: > > (3) Windows Workgroup authentication using the filer's local user accounts > > So I created a user 'vmrestore' though the useradmin tool and user > vmrestore is part of a group cifsonly which has role none assigned to it. I > then added an entry to /etc/passwd for the vmrestore user. At this point I > can create a share to the vmware .snapshot directory on the snapvault > destination and give the vmrestore user access to the share via: > > filer> cifs access vmsnaps vmrestore rwx > > I can now connect to the share fine but cannot access any of the shares > folders as I get a "Access is denied" error. I've been reading the netapp > docs and googling around for a while now but am having a difficult time > understanding how I need to configure the local user account so I can access > the folders/files on the unix security style volumes. > > I've tried mapping the vmrestore user to the root user via the usermap.cfg > file. Thinking that since the vm files are owned by root maybe the vmrestore > user has to be mapped to a user with a uid of 0 to have access to them. I've > also tried the --forcegroup option on the share. > > Basically, I'm not having any luck and wanted to see if anyone has run into > this (or just knows what I'm doing wrong). > > Any help is very much appreciated. > > Thanks, > > -- > Romeo Theriault > System Administrator > Information Technology Services > -- Romeo Theriault System Administrator Information Technology Services

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Controller upgrade - ESX LUN re-signaturing
by Raj Patel 30 Oct '09

30 Oct '09

Hi all, We're planning to upgrade our controller (a 270c to a 2050ha) - my understanding is the iSCSI LUN's will retain their identity (ie the existing IQN strings will remain the same) however we will probably run into the ESX re-signaturing issue. Is there a way to avoid this as part of the controller upgrade or do I need to go into each connected ESX host and change the value of LVM.EnableResignature to 1 ? Are there any other potential 'gotchas' about an in-place head replacement ? The process itself looks fairly straightforward if all the steps are followed through in sequence. Thanks in advance, Raj.

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