Hi, I played around with SnapCreator 3.5 this afternoon. I'm pleasantly surprised by the functionality it offers, and I will definitely invest more time in it.
However, I've got a couple of beginner questions I'd like to ask:
- I am in the CET timezone. In the "Schedules" and "Job Monitor" section of the GUI, under "Management", I see the times indicated as GMT with a 2-hour difference. However, the logfiles have timestampts in CET, as do the messages inside them. Can SnapCreator be configured to display all time information as CET (in my case) ?
- The first thing I tried to configure was a profile and a schedule for a Windows server with a couple of SnapDrive LUNs. Those LUNs needed basic consistent snashotting. I was able to do this by running sdcli.exe the NTAP_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_CMD1 setting, as explained in the docs. Now, I have a bunch of standard application servers, each of them with a number of LUNs. After I got my first configuration up and running via the GUI, I created a new configuration for another server manually by copy-pasting the first server's configuration. I really like the fact that everying is saved in a simple text file and that the GUI can reload this at any time! (I am also under the impression that the agent rereads its configfile after it has been changed without having to restart the service - cool!) Ideally, I would like to be able to copy-paste configs for new servers and limit the effort to just changing the SC_AGENT setting in the config file. However, for new servers I also had to change the following settings:
VOLUMES
SNAPVAULT_VOLUMES
SNAPMIRROR_VOLUMES
NTAP_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_CMD1
How do you go about creating quick configuration for different servers based on the same "template server". Ideally I want to configure SC to "snapshot all the LUNs and mountpoints via sdcli" and then trigger SnapMirror/SnapVault regardless of what volumes the LUNs are on. What happens when you create an additional LUN and drive letter for a server ? Do you need to add the new volume to the configfile, and change the sdcli.exe command to include the new driveletter ?
In the GUI, one can list the volumes for a certain config under "Data"/"Volumes", but this is basically read-only information, no way to add or remove volumes to a configuration from there.
(on an related note, although this is not SC-specific, how can you use sdcli.exe and tell it to snapshot all the NetApp LUNs without providing an explicit list via the "-D" option - that way one could just use the same NTAP_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_CMD1 for all configurations ?)
Maybe I need to read up on the discovery feature of SC. I enabled snapdrive discovery in the configuration, but I am not sure what it does exactly ...
- The Installation and Administration Guide mentions that SC can be used with SMSQL 6.0. Is this a typo ? The highest version of SMSQL I can find on the NOW site is 5.1.
- When configuring a backup for SMSQL or SME, do you have to enable the "consitency group" feature, or will SMSQL/SME take care of that when it is called (I would assume the setting doesn't matter in SC and SMSQL/SME will handle the snapshotting anyway) ?
- At the moment I am getting this error when running a backup for an SMSQL server - I think it is SMSQL 5.0. Am I getting this error because SMSQL 5.0 is not supported with SC ?
[Wed Apr 4 17:09:27 2012] [vmwk30047:9090(3.5.0.1)] ERROR: [sms-00005] Command [%SystemRoot%\Sysnative\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -psconsolefile C:\Program Files\NetApp\SnapManager for SQLServer\smsqlShell.psc1 -command "new-backup -svr vmwk30047 -RetainBackups 24 -lb -bksif -RetainSnapofSnapInfo 24 -trlog -mgmt standard"] failed with return code 256 and message
[Wed Apr 4 17:09:27 2012] [vmwk30047:9090(3.5.0.1)] ERROR: [sms-00002] Quiescing databases failed
[Wed Apr 4 17:09:23 2012] [vmwk30047:9090(3.5.0.1)] ERROR: [scf-00053] Application quiesce for plugin smsql failed with exit code 256, Exiting!
- I am still a little confused about the difference between a schedule and a policy. Right now, I have one backup profile per server I need to backup (this corresponds to a directory under the configs directory). Then, for a particular server, I created multiple configuration, eg. "servername-hourly", "servername-daily", etc. As an example of some differences between the configurations, a "-daily" configuration will use SnapMirror to replicate volumes, whereas an "-hourly" configuration will not update SnapMirrors. In the configuration, there are four policies to choose from: hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.
Then, in the schedules, I created a schedule per configuration. What is the point of selecting a pilcy there ? The dropdown also has those four policies. And then one can select a frequency again, where you will set the actual frequency for the snapshots. I'm not entirely sure how one is supposed to configure things ...
Let me just reiterate that this product looks very nice and powerful, great work so far guys ! I think this product is very powerful. For beginners, I think it could use a couple of step-by-step guides on how to create simple configurations like a SnapDrive backup of a server, an example of SMSQL integration, how discovery works, etc. Perhaps a couple of YouTube movies would be really cool !
Best regards,
Filip Sneppe