On Dec 18, 9:50am, Nick Thompson wrote:

Subject: ClearCase VOBs on NetApp

I have been speaking to engineers at Network Applications who assured me

you mean Network Appliance, right?

that it is possible to create the WHOLE of a ClearCase VOB (including the db) on a NetApp filer (and any other NFS filer for that matter). Since Rational told me this was not possible, I got curious and tried it anyway. It worked! Has anybody else here tried this configuration? Had any problems?

Not the VOB itself. Text pools, DO pools, etc work great on a NetApp, but the VOB (I always thought) needed to be on disk that was physicially local to the VOB server.

take a look at http://www.netapp.com/technology/level3/atria.html for NetApp's version of how to use their filers with Atria.

According to the ClearCase docs, if you can snapshot a complete VOB (as on a Toaster) then it is not necessary to lock it prior to backup

You still want to lock the VOB, take the snapshot, then unlock the VOB before the backup. Since a VOB is a database, if you don't lock it you might get an inconsistant copy of the VOB in the snapshot.

(though some disk may be lost to empty containers if you restore from it). Anybody tried/trust this or would you advise against it?

Our backups work kind of like this. We lock all the VOBS, make a snapshot using Veritas FileSysteM snapshots, unlock the VOB, then backup the snapshot. Same concept, same benefits: backup doesn't lock the VOB for very long, which means developers aren't impacted.

-Skottie