XenServer, FC protocol and SnapManager products

[thome]

I am designing an environment that will use XenServer for virtualization, and will virtualized Exchange 2003 and SQL 2005 servers.

Can I use the associated SnapManager products (SQL, Exchange, Oracle) with XenServer VMs using fibre channel as my protocol of choice on this Windows 2003 based VMs?

In a VMWare environment I would use Raw Device Mappings, but I can't figure out if something similar can be done in XenServer.

I have reviewed the best practice guide here:

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3732.pdf

Thoughts?

Gerry

[jherlihy1]

Hi Gerry,

just wondering how you got on with this, as I've got a similar environment where XenServer 5.6 with FC LUNs will be used and they would also like to use SMSQL & SME for the MSSQL and Exchange VMs.

Did you need to directly map the LUNs via iSCSI to the VMs for Snapdrive/snapmanager to work, or were you able to get FC LUNs to work ok with Snapdrive on the VM through XenServer?

Cheers,

John

[jherlihy1]

Hmmm.. just found this on FieldPortal which says NO to all the above: https://fieldportal.netapp.com/ci_getfile.asp?method=1&uid=6347&docid=32820

[ralfaro01zero]

Hi jherlihy-1

Citrix recommends as a best practice to use NFS for the VM repository, for SnapManager I would go with iSCSI (XS don't support raw device mapping), if you are concerned about performance i think the smart move is to use 10Gb ethernet.

Cheers.

[gautamj]

Please open a PVR with customer name and provide all details. I have received 4 PVRs so far. I believe there are more opportunities out there but not hearing them so I encourage folks to open a PVR. We are working on putting together a plan to formally qualify SMxin XenServer environment

[jherlihy1]

Thanks for that - that's the conclusion I came to as well although I couldn't find it documented that Citrix actually recommends that. Do you have a URL (off the top of your head that shows that?

I found some posts which stated that any XS VMs which had Snapdrive installed (for use with SnapManager etc) had trouble booting and running normal backups with VSS if their non-NetApp disks (ie C: drive) were not on NFS. Something to do with XS StorageLink creating a separate LUN for every disk on a VM (including the C: drive) and mapping through the physical device name (ie "NETAPP LUN") which was confusing Snapdrive when the VSS hardware provider was called.

Cheers,

John

[ralfaro01zero]

I don't have a link right now, but I remember that it was an exam question

[lederman]

Anything new on this?  I'm hearing from customers who would like to run SME in Xen-hosted VMs, but I don't believe NetApp supports that yet.  You can map to "raw" NetApp LUNs using Storage Link in Xen, but the SD/SME support just isn't there yet, correct?