Help with Snapshot/SnapVault schedules

BURTHIGHAM — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:35:11 GMT

Hello everyone,

Our company just recently implemented 8040 ha controllers in our primary and dr locations and I'm hoping i can get some ideas on how folks have snapshot/vault schedules laid out. We are doing a migration from our old platform (Dell Equallogic) and our current requirement for data retention was 3 days. This is mainly due to the space constraints and also the way that eql handled replication. With dedupe and a better replication model thanks to NetApp, we can look at a longer retention period.

Currently I have configured volumes to do a local snapshot at 12am with the snapshot label of "daily". I have a vault relationship with the DR side and a policy schedule that will keep 7 copies of the "daily" label at a vault schedule of 1am. Here are a few questions i have:

What, if any, things do you try to accomplish when creating snapshot schedules and protection policies?
Is there any concerns with controller saturation when kicking off multiple volume snapshots at once? If so how do you combat this?
Are there any best practice documents available?

Thanks in advance

Re: Help with Snapshot/SnapVault schedules

GRAEMEOGDEN — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 16:06:50 GMT

What, if any, things do you try to accomplish when creating snapshot schedules and protection policies?

Depends on the application, business requirement, RPO, legal requirements etc.

Is there any concerns with controller saturation when kicking off multiple volume snapshots at once? If so how do you combat this?

Yes, there can be a CPU impact so it's best to stagger snapshots and snapmirror/vault updates if possible. The general recommendation is to avoid taking snapshots on the hour, as DataONTAP does a lot of internal processing around that time. I try to schedule my daily snapshots to be 00:05 or 00:10. Also try to avoid de-duplication jobs, if any. It's best to schedule de-dupe jobs and then snapshot after they complete in my experience.

Are there any best practice documents available?

The SnapVault best practice guide is pretty old (2012), I'm not aware of a newer one but the principles are similar: http://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-3487.pdf .Also check out the DataONTAP documentation for the version you are running. This is the Data Protection Guide for cDOT 8.2.1 https://library.netapp.com/ecm/ecm_download_file/ECMP1366833

Cheers
G

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Help with Snapshot/SnapVault schedules

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