Hi guys,

I’ve been told that using the iSCSI initiator from within the guest OS on a VM crushes performance and that it isn’t something that you would want to do. Would anybody be able to elaborate on that at all? I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet.

Chris

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Nils Vogels
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 9:50 AM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: Another Snapmanager Question (MS Exchange, VMware ESX)

Hi Mark,

2008/5/20 Neis, Mark <Mark.Neis@gisa.de>:

So far we've used SnapManager for Exchange to create the Snapshots we then back up to tape

via NDMP. If I see this correctly, SnapManager/SnapDrive for Exchange won't work if the storage is

handed out to the underlying ESX instead of the Exchange server itself. On the other hand,

SnapManager for VMware - which is to be released in August, as I could read - doesn't know

about the internals of its VMs and hence is not the tool of choice to back up our Exchange

StorageGroups.

Does anyone out there have a similar scenario? Is there any way to use SnapManager for Exchange

in the environment I described above? What ways do you back up your Exchange installations?

For every customer a different scenario offcourse, but you can install MS iSCSI Initiator in a VM, stack SnapDrive on top of that, and in this way run SnapManager for Exchange.

Basically, you connect a dedicated LUN from within the VM directly to a NetApp, and not use any VMWare functionality (except for OS disks) to run Exchange.

This way you have your snapshotted LUNs and you can back them up any way you like.

There are many variation to this theme, and I heard rumours that NetApp is working on expanding possibilities of SnapManager for VI and SnapDrive, but I'm sure your SE will have more information on that ;)

HTH & HAND,

Nils
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