I just came across an article from VMWare on Raw Device Mappings that states the following:

Raw device mapping makes it possible to run some SAN management agents inside a virtual machine. Similarly, any software that needs to access a device using raw SCSI commands can be run inside a virtual machine. This kind of software may be referred to as "SCSI target based software".

We are using VMWare ESX 2.5.1 with our FAS960c to store VMDK files. We'd love the opportunity to better utilize VMWare and SnapMirror for DR with SQL and other applications but because virtual machines see SAN attached disk as local disk, tools such as SME, SMQ, SnapDrive and SnapMirror won't work within a Windows virtual machine for block level replications. I'm also not ready to base my VMWare DR off of a shareware product like ESXRanger.

I'm aware of the NetApp article detailing hot, warm and cold snapshots of VMWare volumes but none are realistic in a production environment. Hot snapshots offer no guarantees of the snap being good and warm and cold snaps require you to shut down the VM or ESX host respectively.

I'm not sure if this is new for version 2.5.2 but has anyone had any luck running these tools on a Windows VM in VMWare?

Thanks,

John T. Johnson Storage Architect Faegre & Benson, LLP JTJohnson@Faegre.com