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@smud.org
Phone: (916) 732-6744
Cell: (916) 240-4213