SnapManager products

[JustinMedcraft]

Hi all,

I have been given a huge task of planning and preparing a mostly virtual environment to be migrated from its existing backup strategy to NetApp.  We are a Clustered 8.2.3 environment with two sites.  We have a SnapVault license but no SnapMirror.  We sadly don't have SnapProtect, however this is still being looked into.  My only alternatives are to use the SnapManager products.  So far i've planned to use SMVI, SME, SMSQL and SMS (SharePoint).  I have used these products before but only a few years ago so my memory of these products is quite rusty.  I seem to recall that after installing SME for example, it was configured and a powershell script was created and that script was called using Windows task scheduler.  Is this still the case?  What does the script do?  I just want to be able to back up Exchange, SQL & SharePoint using SnapVault.

I have another question.  We are using an NFS only environment.  We are phasing out all other legacy storage etc which will also remove all aspects of fibre channel.  We currently do not have any iSCSI.  It is my understanding that all SnapManager products (excluding SMVI) require the use of either FCP or iSCSI.  Now for the $64,000 question.  How easy will it be to implement iSCSI in order for us to be able to use SnapManager products?

Since the customer has already purchased the Premium Bundle which includes the SnapManager products, i'm obviously loathed to approach them to procure more licenses for SnapProtect, despite SnapProtect being able to answer all of our questions and making life that much more easier.  Does anybody know if NetApp would consider 'taking SnapManager back' and replacing it with SnapProtect?  I'm of the personal opinion that we've been 'sold up the river' without a paddle and i'm now in the position to try to clear things up.

Any responses would be most gratefully received and appreciated.

I look forward to hearing from you.

[dmauro]

Hi Justin,

many questions, but I feel your urge to know all the answers to feel assured and more energetic to start with this big project you have....;-)

I will start by assuring you that SME still does what you described and indeed creates a task which calls the SME powershell module and executes the backup/snapvault.

Howegver, with 7 mode 8.2.3 (I assume you have that since you talked about SnapVault license), you do need DFM protection manager and integrate that with SME,SMSQL or SMSP;

 else it will be more tricky to get snapvault and Snapmanagers working with handmade/Professional Service scripts...

When you say you are using NFS only, you mean vmware datastores made of NEtApp NFS shares? If so, it's no problem. you can use RDM lun's for all products you mentioned.

You can also easily setup iscsi in ESX and on Storage system, that's really more simple than you can imagine and it would not cost you 64k, rather 64$ for a couple of IP's may be  😉

regarding your last question, "Does anybody know if NetApp would consider 'taking SnapManager back' and replacing it with SnapProtect?" I think you should have a friendly chat with your Netapp or Partner Sales rep. If you ask me, I would stick to either one of them, because after having taken the burden to setup either one type of solution or the other, I would not throw away the whole config and start all over with the other. I guess that's just me.

hope it helps,

Domenico.

[JustinMedcraft]

Hi Domenico,

So, from your response I can guess that I wouldn't need to implement iSCSI, or indeed if I had to it wouldn't involve much??  Do I need to modify the network switch environment to support iSCSI traffic?  Do I need specific hardware for the NetApp and/or ESX host?  Apologies for so many questions, but i've never implemented iSCSI before and it's looking increasingly likely that this is the route that we're going to be going down.

To answer some of your questions, we have Clustered ONTAP 8.2.3 with SnapVault (equivalent).  Do I then still need DFM Protection Manager?

We only have NFS presented datastores to the virtual environment.  You state that we can use RDM LUNs for all products mentioned.  So this means that we could still use SnapManager for Exchange, SQL and SharePoint using RDM LUNs and not require iSCSI?  Is there a performance hit on using RDMs over NFS?

Thank you for your initial response.  I've obviously asked more questions which I very much look forward to your responses for.

Kind Regards

Justin Medcraft

[dmauro]

If you implement RDM (Raw Device Map) LUN's on NFS datastores, you don't have to implement iSCSI , but , if you want to, it's just a couple of clicks in vsphere

no additional hardware is required anywhere for iSCSI. you just use the curent NIC's. Implementing RDM lun's should supposedly give you better performance, otherwise I would not see the point of doing that.

If you have Clustered ONTAP 8.2.3, then the equivalent of SnapVault is called SnapMirror XDP, in which case, SnapManager supports updating snapvault natively (without DFM).

hope that helps,

Domenico Di Mauro.