VMware Solutions Discussions

Got questions about SMVI?

mlisa
35,772 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

ALVSERVERSUPPORTTEAM
3,407 Views

We have two log files, both roughly 200MB and when I open them with the Logview tool they are about 2,850,000 lines long and take 10 minutes 22 seconds to open.

Is this typical, or should we be concerned something else is going on and filling up the log files?

amritad
3,516 Views

yeah it's not x64 compatible yet. In case you have feedback on this do let us know. We'll TRY to incorporate those

REgards

Amrita

chadfisette
3,516 Views

Any time frame on when this will be in available in x64?

amritad
3,516 Views

This will only be available in 32 bit currently.

REgards

Amrita

chadfisette
3,351 Views

I am in favor of seeing things in the GUI view and not using another tool to look at the logs. Help out

the admins here and put everything in one spot.

amritad
3,351 Views

Yes agree. We'll get there

REgards

Amrita

miguel_maldonado
3,258 Views

Hello,

We have installed SMVI 2.0 and were testing SFR. After some errors in unmounting the SFR the jobs got stock on mounted even though we unmounted them manually on the filer. We checked for flex clone volumens and their snapshots and none are present, still we cannot delete these jobs. We deleted the SFR restore jobs and cleared the configuration from the SFR agent and still cannot delete these jobs. We unistalled SMVI and reinstalled it on the same path and stiil we encountered the same problem.

Hoping you could help us,

Best regards

Miguel

amritad
3,258 Views

Hi

Quick question is FlexClonelicensed on the filer?

REgards

Amrita

miguel_maldonado
3,227 Views

Hello,

Yes we have a 60 day trial version of FlexClone License installed.

Thank you

Best regards,

Miguel

amritad
3,227 Views

Hi

So you have created an SFR session on the SMVI server. You were able to restore single files but you're not able to unmount the backups. Is that what is happening? What happens if you delete the SFR session from the SMVI server. Are the backups still not getting unmounted?

REgards

Amrita

miguel_maldonado
3,227 Views

Hello,

That is correct, even though I erased all traces of the job (session, mounts, flexclones and its snapshots) I still cannot unmount the SFR mounted disk hence I cannot delete the backup jobs either. There is no trace of the backup jobs, thery are only listed on the restore window and we cannot delete them.

Thank again.

Best Regards

Miguel

amritad
3,227 Views

Hi Miguel ,

On the restore tab you will see the unmount button. You could unmount these backups using that.

Or you can go to the vcenter server. Then browse datastore you will see all these backups mounted there. Very carefully choose the SFR backups that you want to unmount them. Do not unmount your actual datastores. Then it will get cleaned up.

SFR cleans up after you delete the session if you still see these issues you can file a case to check what's happening.

REgards

Amrita

miguel_maldonado
3,258 Views

Hello again,

We have another question. We have three nics with different IPs in or SMVI server. We use the .90 IP as managament, however, emails with notifications regarding the state of jobs, succesfull or unsuccessfull are arriving with our services IP .165. How do we set the correct ip in these reports? we can only change the IP were it is published the SFR agent but not which IP we choose as a link report.

On the credentials, on the setup page we have configured the .90 IP as the server IP

Our gateway is within the .90 network.

Thank you again.

Best regards,

Miguel

amritad
3,258 Views

Hi

On the vcenter server you need to give your vcenter server details. There will be a general tab within set-up there you would need to specify the administrator e-mail address and the mailserver details. Does that make sense?

REgards

Amrita

miguel_maldonado
3,227 Views

Yes, we have configured that, the sending email address and the smtp server used to delivered the mail but there is no field to place an specific IP address as a retourn IP address t

that we would like to appear in the mail.

Thank you

Best Regards,

Miguel

daniel_kaiser
3,227 Views

It would be a nice feature to have some type of safety net before restoring a datastore in SMVI on accident.  I'm specifically referrinig to the datastore listed under "Backed-up Entities" which is selected by default.  I caught my self a couple of times switching between different datastores to locate a VM machine to restore and almost selected the datastore instead of the virtual machine under "Backed-up Entities."

khalidsalem
3,227 Views

Hi,

We are a Netapp customer and have  implemented our vSphere on Netapp storage and have gained all the benefits of deduplication, RCU, VCS etc.. and are very impressed and happy with it all.

We faced backup issues for our Virtual Infrastructure and tried many options like Vmware Disaster recovery, VCB & Veem Backup all were Ok and each had some issues. We then tried Netapp SMVI 2 and its fast & fantastic.. but we have one problem. Our Backup Policy requires us to have a longer retention of our backups like for one year and then the yearly tape backup stored for ten years off site.

My Question is .. How can we offload the snapshot backups by using an enterprise backup software to transfer to tapes so we can store them off site. I know that Snapmirror can keep copies of the snapshot on another storage but we need it to be transferred to tape media to comply with our audit requirement. Can you help or suggest a solution for this?

Second Question .. How can we have long retentions like for a year knowing the fact that the snapshot limit is 255.  Is there a way to have an extended continuity like restoring point in time snapshots from a SnapVault solution?

Appreciate your response.

Russell Julian

amritad
3,227 Views

Hi

We have provided a sample snapvault script in Appendix E of the best practices guide.

http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3737.html

Does this help?

Similarly oyu could specify custom pre/poss backup scripts that could move snapshots to tape.

Regards

Amrita

radek_kubka
3,227 Views

You can stream NetApp snapshots to tape using a number of backup software products by utilizing NDMP feature:

http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/a-z/backup-to-tape/backup-to-tape-ndmp.html

Regards,

Radek

amiller_1
3,227 Views

Spot-on from Radek -- NDMP can run over FC directly to a tape library (backup server plays traffic cop but doesn't process data) or over IP through the backup server (backup server receives all data and writes it to tape).

collieritops
3,856 Views

We've ran into the problem from KB55692 https://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb55692 more than once. I just had backups failing again on a volume with the "failed to rename snapshot error".

2010-04-27 16:51:35,760 PROGRESS - Creating storage snapshots for all datastores/virtual machines that are being backed up.
2010-04-27 16:51:40,994 ERROR - Failed to rename snapshot smvi__tier3_f5esx_01_20100427165000 to smvi__tier3_f5esx_01_recent on volume bccf5filer02:/vol/tier3_f5esx_01
2010-04-27 16:51:40,994 ERROR - FLOW-11019: Failure in NaSnapshotCreateActionWrapper: Failed to rename snapshot smvi__tier3_f5esx_01_20100427165000 to smvi__tier3_f5esx_01_recent on volume bccf5filer02:/vol/tier3_f5esx_01
2010-04-27 16:51:40,994 ERROR - FLOW-11010: Operation transitioning to abort due to prior failure.

According to the KB the first thing it suggests is deleting all the backups of this datastore in SMVI -- well, when I go under restore I don't even see this datastore listed. There are also no snapshots on the filer for this volume. So I'm just going to delete and re-create the backup job with a new name. Like I said, we had to do this before for another job.

I'm not sure if we're doing something wrong or if there are just bugs related to this. If they are indeed bugs, are there plans to fix it in a future release? The problem to me seems to be a lack of communication & synchronization between SnapManager apps and the filer. SnapManager products are in their own little world and unaware of other snaps that may be created, deleted, etc. It would seem logical to build in some type of intelligence into the SnapManager apps so they're more in sync with the filer. This lack of integration has bit us before when we had autodelete kick in and delete a SnapManager for Exchange snapshot and this messed it up. It should be smart enough to handle that...

I hope that SMVI and all the SnapManager products are headed into that direction.

P.S. Throw in centralized management of ALL SnapManagers in a single UI with full job scheduling control, reporting, etc and I'd be very very happy!!

Thanks

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