Our databases are on RDMs, actually all our VMs are on RDMs.

I'm working on migrating to NFS/IP storage and SMVI is part of that design.

-----Original Message----- From: Matt Hallmark [mailto:matt@cosmictoaster.com] Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 4:00 PM To: Ken Williams Cc: Bill Holland; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: SMVI - Limitations?

Are your databases on VMDK's, RDM's or are you using an iscsi initiator in the VM?

Thx,

Matt

On Jan 8, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Ken Williams wrote:

In our environment if we perform a VMWare snapshot of a SQL or Oracle database it will crash. So we've actually set policy so those do not get snapshots.

From: Bill Holland [mailto:hollandwl@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 3:43 PM To: Ken Williams; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: SMVI - Limitations?

I've been experimenting with SMVI some and it appears to work hand- in-hand with vCenter. Essentially, it takes a VMware snapshot, followed by a filer snapshot (and snapmirror update if you tell it to), then deletes the VMware snapshot. The VMware snapshot before the

filer snapshot ensures the volumes are quiesced and buffers flushed before the filer snapshot to ensure consistency.

I think you'll still have to place your databases in hot backup mode before taking a snapshot.

Currently our Oracle and SQL data, index, redo, and archives exist on iSCSI LUNs with SnapDrive for Windows. As we progress with VMware, we

will likely place our OS and Applications either on NFS volumes or VMFS formatted iSCSI LUNs. We will then continue to use SnapDrive for

Windows to manage our database LUNs as this is something we are familiar with and are very comfortable with our current recovery model

in regards to the databases themselves. Plus we often wish to take snaphots on them several times a day during our production cycles. Simply go into hot backup mode, take snapshot of all but archive volumes, exit hot backup mode, snapshot archive volume. It happens so

quickly our users never notice it and we have recovery points at key times during our production cycle should something go wrong during one

of the daily operations. This is for Oracle. Our SQL databases are small and not mission critical so simply taking a filer snapshot and letting SQL do its crash recovery if we restore a snapshot works fine. ----- Original Message ----- From: Ken Williams To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 2:41 PM Subject: SMVI - Limitations?

We're making the plunge to move to NFS and SMVI (from RDM backed luns and homegrown snapshot management scripts).

Does anyone know of any limitation to how many VMs can exist in a data

store that SMVI is snapping? Is there any impact when snapping virtual

machines (outside of SQL/Oracle VMs)?

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Ken Williams Storage Administrator, Business Technology Operations Sacramento Municipal Utility District E-Mail: kwillia@smud.org Phone: (916) 732-6744 Cell: (916) 240-4213