Hi Glenn,
Echoing my private reply from last week to the Toasters
list for everyone's benefit, plus adding some detail that I did not include in
that reply....
There are formulas in the administrator's guide that can
be used for proper sizing of the LUN and storage appliance volume. There are
separate formulas for the SnapInfo LUN when it is on its own
separate LUN or on the same LUN as the Exchange transaction logs. For example,
here is the formula for calculating the LUN size for SnapInfo when it resides
on its own, separate LUN:
SnapInfo LUN size = ((number of transaction logs
generated per day * 5 MB) * (number of backups to keep
online))
In addition to that, it is a "best practice" to use the
backup retention features that are built into SnapManager. There is the
option to delete backups in excess of a specified amount as part of the backup
job. A new feature introduced in today's SnapManager 3.2 release is age
based backup retention.
I have no idea why your SnapInfo LUN ran out of space but
please allow me to make a couple of suggestions so that this can be
prevented from happening again.
1) Make sure that your SnapInfo LUN (and the storage
appliance volume that it resides on) are properly sized according to the
administrator's guide or better yet get your configuration analyzed by your
NetApp technical sales representative and have them run it through the
Exchange sizer.
2) Take advantage of the backup retention features (age
based retention is new in 3.2)
3) Consider archiving the older backup sets. There are
several ways that this can be accomplished and they are documented in the
administrator's guide along with some sample scripts. You can also archive the
SnapManager backups to another NetApp storage appliance. This is
described in detail in NetApp Knowledge Base article 3990.
Hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any
further questions or concerns.
Regards,
Paul Benn
SnapManager Development Team
Network Appliance
Be VERY careful here. If your SnapInfo Lun isn't
big enough, SME backups WILL fail (experience talking here). It needs
to be big enough to house (potentially) the entire transaction log, plus
some.
Glenn (the other one again).
Hi Jochen,
Snapinfo-lun is needed for SnapManager for
Exchange(SME). This is where SME stores its information for recovery. Its
basically used when running "up to the minute recovery", where it copied all
the transcaction logs before it truncated them while creating the snapshot
backups. So when you do an "up to the minute" recovery from older snapshots,
it uses this location to bring in the older transaction logs to be replayed.
Why do you want to configure 2 separate aggregates? did you
mean volumes? I'd rather have a very large aggregate with as many disks I
can get hold of instead of 2 smaller aggregates. It definetly improves
performance.
The way we have it setup in our environemnt is 1 large
aggregate with 3 volumes per exchange host..
- 1 vol for the storage
group with luns for each store
- 1 vol for log lun
- 1 vol for snap
info lun
We also have other CIFS shares on volumes/qtrees within the same
aggregate.
Hope this helps
-G
On 3/29/06, Willeke,
Jochen <Jochen.Willeke@wincor-nixdorf.com>
wrote:
Hi
everybody,
we are setting up an exchange 2003 system on a filer.
Right now i am
about to size the system. I often read that i need to
have a
snapinfo-lun. But i do not understand where i need this lun
for.
Exchange does not need it, does it?
What i want to
configure are two aggregates. One containig qtrees with
luns for the
databasefiles and one aggregate with qtrees and luns for
the logfiles.
And if really needed i would put the snapinfo-lun into the
logfile
aggregate.
Perhaps somebody has already set up an exchange server
on netapp storage
and can help me.
Thanks a lot in
advance
Jochen