VMware Solutions Discussions

Got questions about SMVI?

mlisa
35,873 Views

Our team is very interested in the questions posted on SMVI functionality, configuration, and automation … thanks for taking the time to share.  And please keep the questions and feedback on your experiences working with SMVI, good or bad, coming.  Good feedback makes for a good day, bad feedback makes for a better product J.

I also wanted to let you know that NetApp is hosting an SMVI/SRM Webcast on February 19 focusing on data protection in a VMware environment: NetApp SMVI for backup/restore and VMware SRM for disaster recovery. SDDPC Sys Admin Rick Scherer - who designed and maintains a 25 host VMware ESX 3.5 farm with well over 300 Virtual Machines, plus writes a great blog (http://vmwaretips.com/wp/) - will be joining us to describe how his team uses SMVI. There will also be a panel of folks, including best practices authors and reference architects, to address questions submitted via chat.

Webcast: http://communications.netapp.com/p/Network_Appliance/20090219140000WL?REF_SOURCE=communities

Lisa Haut-Mikkelsen

SMVI Product Manager



213 REPLIES 213

mlisa
6,153 Views

Rick, in SMVI 3.0, SMVI will be integrated with Protection Manager, enabling backups to be sent to a secondary system (rather than the primary system where the VM currently resides).  In SMVI 2.0, a VMDK can be restored to the same or different datastore.  In SMVI 3.0, this will be true for a VM as well, meaning that you will be able to specify the datastore - within the current virtual infrastructure - in which the VM should be restored.

In 1QCY2010, NetApp will release a single vSphere client plugin that will expose a full set of services for managing a vSphere environment running on NetApp storage.  It will integrate the capabilities from 3 separate products: SMVI (B/R), RCU (provisioning/cloning), and VSC (storage configuration setting/monitoring).  And yes, this version of SMVI will be 2.1.

berkhout
6,006 Views

Hi, I have 3 questions / issues:

1. In SMVI, we have a lot of backups scheduled.

The next day, in the Schedule Backup Jobs, we notice that in the column Last Run Status, entries sometimes keep the status "running".

See attached screen-snap.

How can we find the root-cause and how can we prevent it to happen?

2. While creating snapshots, microsoft v6 logs entries in the windows event viewer.

These log-entries are not easy to understand or explain.

Is there a "best-practise" way to handle these events?

Example:

App: E 'Thu Sep 03 16:57:33 2009': SMVI - " 887025365 [backup2 a698d20f1d6dc1182163a82e84b916a8] ERROR

com.netapp.common.flow.JDBCPersistenceManager - FLOW-10110: Lock "1600e046-478b-421e-ab7d-38073e111fad"

already held by backup-create operation e66f178fb5ded61f4280683ce329c75b [] "

App: E 'Thu Sep 03 16:57:28 2009': SMVI - " 887020302 [backup0 fc51f04c320c9477de9245c8079fd409] ERROR

com.netapp.common.flow.JDBCPersistenceManager - FLOW-10110: Lock "681363cf-0666-4dbc-ab54-93da14d888fd"

already held by backup-create operation a6058363e1d3726a2bdf35f801267a44 [] "

App: E 'Thu Sep 03 16:57:23 2009': SMVI - " 887015240 [backup4 e7bafab20a3f5f15522fa6801b0a9bcb] ERROR

com.netapp.common.flow.JDBCPersistenceManager - FLOW-10110: Lock "681363cf-0666-4dbc-ab54-93da14d888fd"

already held by backup-create operation a6058363e1d3726a2bdf35f801267a44 [] "

App: E 'Thu Sep 03 16:57:03 2009': SMVI - " 886995146 [backup1 a698d20f1d6dc1182163a82e84b916a8] ERROR

com.netapp.common.flow.JDBCPersistenceManager - FLOW-10110: Lock "1600e046-478b-421e-ab7d-38073e111fad"

already held by backup-create operation e66f178fb5ded61f4280683ce329c75b [] "

3. If the scheduler start a lot of jobs, for each single job an email is sent.

To check if all backups were succesful, we need to read through all these emails.

Is there a nicer way, maybe using a script, that gives us a quick overview of failed backup jobs?

Like an overview with coloured dots (traffic-light), that indicates what was succesful and what failed?

Regards,

Jack Berkhout

berndi
6,006 Views

Hi I have a question to SMVI and MS SQL Server backup:

I want to use SMVI 2.0 to backup two VMs (vSpere4) Win2003 64bit with MSSQL Server 2008 and all the disks on a single Netapp LUN (VMFS).

What's the best practice to handle this? We also have licenses for Snapmanager for SQL, is there a way to combine this?

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

bernd

InfoSys00
6,006 Views

chadfisette
5,879 Views

Has anyone had issues upgrading to SMVI 2.0 and getting a error when trying to start SMVI stating: Can't find class: org/java/plugin/boot/Boot

amritad
5,880 Views

Hi

No not really. What version are you upgrading from?

Regards

Amrita

chadfisette
5,880 Views

I installed the latest version of java and added some extra free space to C: (even though I was installing to E:), rebooted, reinstalled 2.0, rebooted, and it started working again.

amritad
5,880 Views

That's good. The temporary disk space required for installation is 1.2 GB.

Regards

Amrita

chadfisette
6,005 Views

The only problem I have not is that I cannot update some of my backup jobs, I get this:

Backup hounfsds01_0800_SM is already in use. Please try this command again later.

FLOW-11019: Failure in AcquireLockWrapper: Backup hounfsds01_0800_SM is already in use. Please try this command again later.

FLOW-11008: Operation failed: Backup hounfsds01_0800_SM is already in use. Please try this command again later.

alinpop07
5,052 Views

Hi,

i'm getting errors on my SMVI server's event log, about 2 particular vm's of about 20. This is a phycical box, that is also running virtual center. Other VM's in the volume do not have this problem. could you please give me a clue as to what could be causing this? There's plenty of room for snapshots in the volume.

Thank  you

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    SMVI
Event Category:    Error
Event ID:    4096
Date:        2/24/2010
Time:        2:00:31 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    NGINTERFACE
Description:
2225115906 [backup0 527f2ede036c28b57f7fe84e303a2dfc] ERROR com.netapp.smvi.task.vmware.snapshot.VmSnapshotCreateDelay - VM "Webmail" will not be backed up since VMware snapshot create operation failed.

amritad
5,053 Views

Hi

Is VMware tools installed on the machine?

Regards

amrita

collieritops
4,093 Views

Any updates on new SMVI releases (2.1)?

Will it be integrated into the NetApp tab in vSphere client?

What other changes & improvements are coming?

amritad
4,093 Views

Hi

Our release in summer is when SMVI becomes a vCenter plug-in.

Regards

Amrita

chadfisette
4,094 Views

So you will no longer need a dedicated install of SMVI on a server.  Only the plugin will be needed?  Will you be able to get all the old schedules in SMVI 2.0 migrated over?

amritad
4,094 Views

there will be an upgrade path.

Regards

Amrita

collieritops
4,635 Views

Any updates? Feature list...release timeframe, etc?

amritad
4,637 Views

Watch out for our summer release

Regards

Amrita

ALVSERVERSUPPORTTEAM
4,000 Views

We ran into an issue where the service must have gotten hung up and when we rebooted the server the jobs started kicking off over and over again.

Our jobs are scheduled for night time only, and these started to continuously kick off during the middle of the day. It got me thinking that the schedule really needs to have a defined backup window and jobs should never kick off (even if they are trying to catch up) outside of the window. And maybe they don't and this was some other problem we were having which is still under investigation from the Netapp support team.

My other request is that there should be some easy way to see in the GUI what is going on in real time. Like the recent tasks pane at the bottom of the VI Client. Even if it is a scheduled job it should show what it is doing and why. And maybe even be able to cancel a running job (even a scheduled job) via this window. And right along with this request it would be nice to be able to view the log files in the GUI. It can be very painful to drill down and try to find these log files as ours never seemed to be installed in standard directories, and we don't view them often enough to memorize where they are located.

Thanks SMVI team!

amritad
4,093 Views

Great news!!!

Fo viewing our logs we have an SMVI logviewer tool. It's available on NOW.

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/tools/logviewer/

REgards

Amrita

collieritops
4,093 Views

This is what i get when i open server.log under c:\program files\netapp\smvi\log.  We are running SMVI version 2.0 on windows 2008 x64

collieritops
4,202 Views

We were able to get it working on a 32-bit system...I guess it's just not x64 compatible.

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