FilerView for ONTAP 7.0 concentrated on the commonly used features of Flexible Volumes and Aggregrates. Aggregate snapshots was not considered a commonly used feature.
-----Original Message-----
From: Derek Lai [mailto:Derek.Lai@onyxco.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 6:12 PM
To: 'Skottie Miller'; Steve Losen
Cc: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Aggregate snapshots?
Is this documented well anywhere? I've just started playing
with DataOntap
7.0 on the new FAS250 we bought. I've looked through NOW and
can't seem to
find good documentation regarding Aggregate Snapshots.
It looks like there are a number of commands now that has -A
options added,
i.e. snap list -A to list the aggregate snapshot. Would be
nice to know what
Aggregate Snapshot are designed to do. There does not seem to
be anything in
filerview that lets you work with Aggregate snapshots?
Derek
-----Original Message-----
From: Skottie Miller [mailto:skottie@anim.dreamworks.com]
Sent: Monday, April 25, 2005 11:53 AM
To: Steve Losen
Cc: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: Aggregate snapshots?
My understanding of aggregate snapshots is that they provide
an additional
layer of snapshot protection, and are useful in some environments.
restoring an aggregate snapshot restores *all* the flexVols
within that
aggregate. aggregate snapshots are required if you use RAID
SyncMirror
and/or MetroCluster configurations.
or of you want to snaprestore a whole aggregate (seems dangerous).
Note that aggregate snapshots aren't allowed to grow abouve
the reserve, and
will "autodelete" themselves to maintain space.
on my test filers and in my test use of the simulator, I've
been running
with aggregate snapshots disabled and the reserve set to 0. NetApp
"discourages" this, but unless they send me 5% more disks,
free, I want that
space back for production.
-skottie
Steve Losen wrote:
We just got a R200 and FAS960c and I immediately upgraded them from
6.5 to 7.0.0.1. I moved the root volume to a flex vol and
destroyed
the old root, so now I have one big aggregate that contains
the root
volume.
I discovered the "df -A" command and was surprised to see that my
aggregate has snap reserve space, a snap sched running, and five
snapshots. This is independent of the snap reserve and sched of my
root volume.
What is the rationale behind aggregate snapshots? We don't have
snapmirror licensed. Can you snapmirror them? Can you snaprestore
them? I presume this mirrors (or restores) the entire aggregate.
I doubt that you can access aggregate snapshots from a NFS or CIFs
client, or can you? Can you somehow tease out volumes from an
aggregate snapshot and NFS export them? Within an
aggregate snapshot,
do you have just the active volumes, or the volumes and all
of their
volume level snapshots as they existed at the time the aggregate
snapshot was taken? Mind boggling.
I am probably going to set the snap reserve on my
aggregates to zero
and turn off the snap sched and manage my snapshots at the volume
level. Any reason to not do that? Using both aggregate and volume
snapshots looks about the same as using a belt and
suspenders to keep
your pants up.
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support
--
Scott Miller
skottie@DreamWorksAnimation.com
Ehrhart, Rick