You have two bottlenecks you might run into with the current setup: 1. CPU Redline 2. Disk utilization 3. Disk RPM for DR From my experience the FAS2050/FAS2020 can serve data well as long as it doesn't have to doing anything else. These are single CPU storage controllers and red line CPU easily when additional tasks are given to them. The FAS2040 is more powerful so I'm not sure of performance when having to handle multiple tasks. A full shelf of 15k drives can produce the IO you are looking for. However, the DR site could have issues keeping up with SnapMirror traffic because of the high load from snapshot clean up. This is depends on the number and size of volumes you snapmirror and the frequency you update. Everytime you update a snapmirror relationships you kick off a back ground processes to update the inodes. I had problems with the following until I upgraded FAS2050 with two shelves of 300 FC - Production FAS2050 with 14 1TB SATA - DR We deployed 40 Virtual Machines on 4 Volumes runing on Hyper-V Exchange CCR Volumes Multiple SQL DB Volumes We were updating snapmirror hourly for databaes and daily for Virtual Machines volumes We were also deduping virtual machine data daily The result was 75% CPU utilization for production and 90% disk utlization for DR. -Robert ... View more

We use the mlink command to create a Symbolic Link of an exisiting Hyper-V virtual machine configuration file. This allows us to add a virtual machine to a different Hyper-V host without using the import/export features of the Hyper-V management console. The symbolic link is a one time configuration and SnapMirror keeps the VHD's and virtual machines configuration up to date at the DR location. If snapshots are used then you will have create symbolic links for those snapshot. We generally do not use snapshots on Hyper-V hosts to avoid the complications have to link those in DR. We do have a license for SMHV and I have the latest verison installed on our new Windows 2008 R2 cluster. However, I'm unfamilar with how the DR scripts work and it is difficult to find anyone with knowledge of actual implementations. -Robert ... View more

We ended up operating on a total of 6 phsyical NIC's due to the limits of our blades. We used the following: 1 NIC - Cluster Hearbeat 3 NICs - SERVER Team with 4 VLANS (MGMT, SERVER, DMZ, VMHB) 2 NICs - ISCSI TEAM MGMT - Management VLAN for parent partition SERVER - VM Virtual Switch on SERVER VLAN DMZ - VM Virtual Switch on CMZ VLAN VHHB - Cluster Heart Beat VLAN (For Application Clusters) We operate in 5 node Windows 2008 Hyper-V cluster and haven't had any issues with bandwidth constraints for VM traffic or ISCSI traffic for the parent or virtual machines. Our networks are teamed with HP network utility. ** The above is a production cluster that has been running for 18 months without issue. Powering 55 Virtual Machines and 100 dedicated LUN's hosting VHD's. Active Directory Citrix Farm Exchange 2007 CCR MOSS 2007 Two SQL Active / Active Clusters (4 SQL Instances) Muliple Applicatons Servers Running on a FAS3140 (43 Disk FC disk Aggregate) 400 Users workload -Robert ... View more

I did the wafl scan status and there is several things going on If the system is attempting to reallocate volumes how do you stop it? These are all snapmirror destentiations so not sure we really want to run reallocate so often -Robert ... View more

statit shows that all disks in aggr0 are running 95 to 100% even when there is no snapmirror or snapvault traffic. Parity disks are at like 4% Dedupe is not running on anything I checked reallocation is turned on but not sure if there are any jobs, not sure how to check that Not sure how to check snapshot cleaning. -Robert ... View more

Host where SMSQL is installed -Robert ... View more

Brendon, Had a similar issues cause by an incorrect password used when installing SnapDrive 6.2 and Protection Manager Integration. RE-installing snapdrive would not update DFM with the correct password. I had to use snapdrive cli to update the password with DFM. The account would be locked out at the very beginig of each SMSQL backup. sdcli dfm_config set –host <dfm host>  -user <domain\service account> -pwd <password> ... View more

Data protection is not difficult if you don't have to monitor it, report on it, or test it. The selling points in data protection has been on the most efficient method to backup data with the least amount of infrastructure. However, the amount of resources that is required to monitor, report, and test it without impacting the business can make it difficult. NetApp makes it easier to protect your data but the same challenges remain for everything else. -Robert ... View more

We have not implemented a Geo Cluster with NetApp but we are using SnapMirror and Symbolic Links allowing us to link the same VM configuration on two different Hyper-V clusters in different location. We use BCG to route our production LAN to our DR sight and NetApp snapmirror to replicate our VM and data. Works pretty good and takes about two hours to failover and bring up Exchange, SQL, and Sharepoint on the same network without any modfication to actual VM network configuration. However, the setup of the Symbolic links is complicated and difficult to do during the DR and requires some up front time to ensure you can meet failover SLA. An alternate method is to export VM's and use SCVMM to deploy them on your DR Hyper-V cluster. Maintaining two seperate identical VM configuration with same Network configuration while replicating your LUN and VHD's with NetApp SnapMirror. Also, Citrix Essentilas 5.5 for Hyper-V is advertised to have the same functionality as VMware SRM and has a plug in for NetApp. I do not have experience with it yet and it does requires SCVMM R2 in both sites. Regards, Robert ... View more

I would check with your NetApp account representive. We were only required to purchase one SME license for our Exchange CCR enviroment. -Robert ... View more

We recently upgraded to 7.3.2P3 from 7.3.1.1 and did not notice any issues with our steelhead and snapmirror traffic. We haven't turned on compression yet and don't plan to as we run FAS2050 and CPU is already highly utilized. -Robert ... View more

We recently implemented a cluster FAS2050 running 20 x 300 GB SAS along with 14 X 1TB SATA. The 2040 is a more powerful CPU but I would be carefull with the FAS2000 series for heavy workloads. We found that the FAS2050A could handle the workload of 400 global users for Exchange/SQL/Sharepoint running on Hyper-V, the additional tasks such as SnapVault backups, SnapMirror to DR, and Deduplication over taxed the system. Of course we were in a global 24 hour enviroment and backups had to be fast low impact on the host. Hence, the use of NetApp snapshots for backups and the need for 1 hour SnapMirror updates to DR. This is our experience and you really need to engage NetApp Pre-Sales Engineer to gather your requirements and recomend  a solution. If there is a chance you may need a head upgrade due to growth or under estimating load in the future then I would avoid using internal disks. Upgrade with external shelf is much easier then internal disks because a waste once you go to 3000 serios and above. -Robert ... View more

I also found the intergration between SnapManager productions Protection Manager frustrating. However, Protection Manager works very well for us in managing SnapVault backups. We have a Hyper-V enviroments with many Qtree/LUN relationships and Protection Manager handles all of the SnapVault configuration. This is very useful in ensuring that when a new Qtree/LUN is added it also is automatically updated with a SnapVault policy. It would be nice if Protection Manager could be the single policy engine for SnapVault and SnapMirror backups. -Robert ... View more

From my experience this is the case. That is why performing an NDMP backup on the SnapVault volume has less impact. SnapVault backups are generally faster then NDMP since they only backup incremental changes. Whereas NDMP are generally level 0 backups of the active file system and when tape is involved speed is limited by network and tape speed. -Robert ... View more

SnapManager products such as SME and SMSQL are not fully integrated with Protection Manager. In SME and SMSQL you can backup to a dataset for the purpose of SnapVault backups. There is no Protection Manager integration for SnapMirror that I'm aware of and the result is SME/SMSQL performs the SnapMirror update directly iwthout the knowledge DFM and Protection Manager. -Robert ... View more

We have a similar setup and we backup to tape using the SnapVault volumes. We backup via NDMP using Netbackup. The problem with backing up using the SnapMirror destination is it makes the volume busy preventing any updates during the backup. NDMP backups also generate a high load on the filer and Aggregate. If SME handles the update of your SnapMirror destentations then SnapVAult will be consistent. However, like everything related to backups you should test the recoverability of your backups on a regular basis to validate this. -Robert ... View more

Depending on your volume and LUN configuration duplicate blocks are either released to the volume or aggregate. The actual file system reported to Windows 2008 R2 does not change how much free space there is.  Space effienency is gained because with deduplication you can now fit more volumes with more Hyper-V LUN's on the same aggregate. -Robert ... View more

Enviroment NetApp 2050 Two X 7 disk raid dp aggregates 1TB sata drives HP LTO-4 4GB FC Netbackup 6.5.4 with shared storage option NDMP dumps of SnapVault volumes 70MB to 90MB/Sec The 2050 can only handle sending a single NDMP dump to one drive at time. If I send a second NDMP dump to another drive I experience high CPU loads, I assume the larger controllers would handle multiple drives at the same time easily. -Robert ... View more

So far the install on Windows 2008 DCE has failed so I'm not sure why this is the case. I'm hopefull the PVR process will produce some results. -Robert ... View more