VSC, Protection Manager and nightly SMVIs

MLINTON397677 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:38:20 GMT

Greetings all,

Preface: I am looking for input on managing SMVI backups. Currently, I use the Virtual Storage Console plug in for VMware to schedule SMVI snapshots. It works well and I cannot complain about the day to day operation of it. However, everytime a VM gets relocated to a new datastore I have to go update the job. If I don't, multiple jobs will take snapshots of the same volume and I have to go back and clean things up. I have tried automating an update process without success. I assign entries at the virtual object level, not the datastore.

Example:

Now, I have protection manager. I am considering making a policy that will just take snapshots of my volumes every night and keep them for 3 days or whatever the requierment is. But, in this case I cannot schedule them to happen thoughout the night, they will happen all at once, am I right?

Our enviornment is 100% FC LUNs provisioned to an ESXi Cluster using VMFS3/5. I am not using the option within the VSC to take a VMware snapshot, all SMVIs are crash consistant.

I'm very open to suggestions. I hate wasting time cleaning up snapshots.

Mark

Re: VSC, Protection Manager and nightly SMVIs

kletzly — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 18:28:42 GMT

Hello Mark

Firstly, ask your NetApp SE for more info and help. If you need me to relay the message, let me know who he/she is.

I am NOT an SMVI smart guy. I had thought that VSC/SMVI knows about VM movement -- at least when DRS does so. But, certainly valid question

I only have 1 site using SMVI. I do have a few sites using SnapCreator. Interestingly, one of these sites using Protection Manager + SC in a coordinated fashion. In fact NetApp PS was key to this deployment.

Well, just my 2 cents

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VSC, Protection Manager and nightly SMVIs

Re: VSC, Protection Manager and nightly SMVIs