Snapmanager for Virtual Infrastructure, RDM to VMFS/NFS Migrations...

I've been experimenting with SMVI some and it appears to work hand-in-hand with vCenter. Essentially, it takes a VMware snapshot, followed by a filer snapshot (and snapmirror update if you tell it to), then deletes the VMware snapshot. The VMware snapshot before the filer snapshot ensures the volumes are quiesced and buffers flushed before the filer snapshot to ensure consistency.

Currently our Oracle and SQL data, index, redo, and archives exist on iSCSI LUNs with SnapDrive for Windows. As we progress with VMware, we will likely place our OS and Applications either on NFS volumes or VMFS formatted iSCSI LUNs. We will then continue to use SnapDrive for Windows to manage our database LUNs as this is something we are familiar with and are very comfortable with our current recovery model in regards to the databases themselves. Plus we often wish to take snaphots on them several times a day during our production cycles. Simply go into hot backup mode, take snapshot of all but archive volumes, exit hot backup mode, snapshot archive volume. It happens so quickly our users never notice it and we have recovery points at key times during our production cycle should something go wrong during one of the daily operations. This is for Oracle. Our SQL databases are small and not mission critical so simply taking a filer snapshot and letting SQL do its crash recovery if we restore a snapshot works fine.