SnapCenter vs SnapManager

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Now that SnapCenter has been out for awhile, I would love to hear what people think of it as opposed to SnapManager for SQL and the other SnapManager products. Does SnapCenter really make things easier, or has it been a headache and you'd prefer to go back to SnapManager? We are considering a deployment after we finish 7-mode transitions in the next few months, so I would love to hear any advice or comments!

[Sahana]

Hi,

Here's a comparison: https://kb.netapp.com/support/s/article/ka41A000000XcVOQA0/feature-comparison-current-generation-snapmanager-products-vs-next-generation-snapcenter-pl...

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Thank you very much Sahana!

The feature comparison is helpful, however I'd like to hear real-world stories from people who have made the switch.

One particular item I noticed in the chart: stream-based backups and restore to marked transactions are not supported in the SQL component of SnapCenter, at least in version 1 which is covered in the link you sent. That would be a deal-breaker as we do log based backups every 15 minutes that stream to the SnapInfo volume. Does anyone know how SnapCenter backs up system databases if they don't do streaming? Has this limitation been lifted in a later version?

[bhirsch]

We were using SMVI to backup all of our VMFS volumes. This worked great using the Virtual Storage console for VMWare. Now that we've upgraded our VMWare environment we are forced to use SnapCenter plugin. This plug in works fine, however lacks the ability to use the generic naming convention for the snapshots. Since we still do NDMP dumps to tape it is important that we could use the generic naming convention of _recent. That functionality is no longer there. I have a case opened with NetApp, but i have a feeling this is functionality the Snap team deserted. Its frustrating that NetApp would replace one product with another and not at a minimum have the same functionality.

[JamesIlderton]

We had the same issue when ONTAP stopped using the ordinal naming for snapshots using snapshot policies, so we have to either A) create crash-consistent snapshots using WFA with ordinal naming, or B) use a customer script we wrote that updates the CommVault subclient's selections based on the newest snapshot when our script runs.  Both are a pain to manage, but we're close to migrating from tape to SnapVault to AltaVault, which will eliminate the issue (and save a ton on CommVault licensing!)  If memory serves the ability to use the _recent naming was actually removed earlier in VSC/SMVI and there was a workaround to modify the config files to revert to the legacy naming...not sure they will ever do that in SnapCenter though.

[bhirsch]

You still have that CV script handy?