I have to admit, I am not an SMVI expert, but I do know a thing or three
about WAFL so I was speaking specifically about how snapshots and
SnapRestore work at the ONTAP/WAFL level.
As far as dedup (SIS), I'm not sure if I understand how/if it would
"interfere" with a SnapRestore.
In the case of a volume-level SnapRestore, the volume reverts back to
the way it looked at the time of the snapshot used for the SnapRestore,
and dedup would be no different there since the block pointers as well
as the fingerprint file would be a part of the SnapRestore. I've
actually never tried to figure out how it would work with a single-file
SnapRestore. The good news is that with the release of the 7.3
simulator, which supports dedup, anyone can try it in their lab without
touching their production stuff (on a smaller scale, of course). At
most, you might have to re-run a full scan, but I'm honestly not sure.
-- Adam Fox
Systems Engineer
adamfox(a)netapp.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Kumar, Rahul [mailto:kumarrahul@siemens.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 12:09 PM
To: Fox, Adam; Sto Rage(c) ; toasters(a)mathworks.com;
Darren.Sykes(a)csr.com
Subject: RE: SMVI - Limitations?
Adam
So in theory, the snaprestore via smvi does actually do an individual
file restores (talking about the a single vm restore) though there may
be 100 of vms on the volume.
So that does mean that we need to dedicate/separate volumes according to
the usage etc.
Also does SIS interfere when vm snaprestores are done by any chance ?
Thanks for making the issue clear.. I am not in grip of the scenario and
possible workarounds or new processes to b e followed
Rahul
-----Original Message-----
From: Fox, Adam [mailto:Adam.Fox@netapp.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 9:51 PM
To: Kumar, Rahul; Sto Rage(c) ; toasters(a)mathworks.com;
Darren.Sykes(a)csr.com
Subject: RE: SMVI - Limitations?
WAFL Snapshots are always at the volume level. If you use the snap
restore software on the controller, you can restore either the entire
volume or an individual file level.
Hope this helps.
-- Adam Fox
Systems Engineer
adamfox(a)netapp.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Kumar, Rahul [mailto:kumarrahul@siemens.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 5:07 AM
To: Sto Rage(c) ; toasters(a)mathworks.com; Darren.Sykes(a)csr.com; Fox,
Adam
Subject: RE: SMVI - Limitations?
Hi Toasters
A general scene and a question related to it.
We have over 5TB of NFS datastore spread across various qtrees.
We were evaluating SMVI and came to know that it also requires
snaprestore to restore the VM's
Now my question is that if e.g there was a qtree with say 50 vms on it
and we'd like to snapshot only a few of them. Will this work ?
When a snap is created on the filer it will capture all the VM's thus
eating up valuable disk space from the snapreserve as time goes by.
Next when we do a restore of the individual machine, it does a snap
restore, however I am not sure if this only restores the individual
machine or the entire stuff
Any insight/help into this will be helpful
Thanks
Rahul
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com]
On Behalf Of Sto Rage(c)
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 4:52 AM
To: toasters(a)mathworks.com
Subject: Re: SMVI - Limitations?
On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 12:19 AM, Darren Sykes <Darren.Sykes(a)csr.com>
wrote:
> You can tell SMVI (v1.1) not to perform OS level disk quiecing on
those
> machines if that's any use to you?
> You'll then get a completely transparent Netapp level snapshot and
won't
> interfere with the VM itself.
>
> Darren
It is SMVI v1.01 BTW, not 1.1
Not sure I understand this correctly, but if you are bypassing OS
disk quiesce (VMWare snapshot) and doing transparent NetApp level
snapshot, then why do you even need SMVI installed? Can't we just do
the regular filer level snap schedule? We just upgraded to 1.01 and
noticed the checkbox and were wondering about its potential use. Any
ideas?
thanks
-G