WFA with Snapdrive/FlexClone for VMDKs

[bsmitty23]

Hi All,

Couldn't seem to find much information on this exact situation, but I was wondering if it is possible. We do not have vCloud Director, just multiple VCenters hosting different environments. Here is what I'm looking to do:

1) Create VM with 2 VMDK's residing on a NFS Volume. One contains the OS, other contains a Database which there is currently no Snapdrive product for

2) Use Netapp SnapCreator along with Snapdrive to issue the commands to quiesce my Database, and initiate the Snap of the Volume. This seems to be supported in the newest version of Snapdrive

3) Snapmirror the Volume to my DR Site

4) Create FlexClone from my DR Volume and mount the NFS share to a VMWare Cluster

5) Mount the Data VMDK to a different VM. I only want to mount the Data VMDK because I want to populate Test/Dev envionments with current data, but not use the same Windows Computer Names as my Production VM's

I'm sure I can do steps 1-3 using my current toolset (Snapdrive, Snapmirror), but I would like to leverage WFA for tasks 4 and 5.

Thanks!

[slair]

Hello,

Did you ever find a solution for this?  i'm looking to do the exact same thing.  It looks like i will have to build a custom command to mound the data vmdk to a different VM.

[goodrum]

The quick answer is yes, you will need to create a custom command.  There is no command to date to add an existing vmdk to a Virtual Machine nor to remote connect to SnapDrive to bring the device in.  My vote would be to use SnapDrive and make the call directly to it from WFA.  This would simplify adding the disk into windows and eliminate multiple steps. 

Jeremy Goodrum, NetApp

The Pirate

Twitter: @virtpirate

Blog: www.virtpirate.com

[slair]

Thank you for your reply.  I see how i can use the SDCLI to connect LUNs but how do I use it to connect VMDKs that reside on a NFS datastore?  I have the NFS datastore mounted to the ESXi host.

Thanks

Sean