Snapcreator and dfm protection manager suggestion/best practice

f_duranti · ‎2011-07-07

There's any kind of best practice regarding integration of snap creator and protection manager?

Backup can be scheduled from pm or from sc and sc backup can be put into dataset. From pm it's possible to run pre-post that can for example launch quiesce/unquisce of application with sc commands. What will be the best/simple way to do a consistent and omogeneos backup? Use only pm running scripts, scheduling all backup (included SQL server/exchange/cigs share volumes) from sc integrating with pm dataset to have alerts or mix the 2 kind of backup ?

Any suggestion?

ktenzer · ‎2011-07-07

There isn't really a best practice you could either

1) Drive everything from DFM

2) Drive everything from SC

It really depends what you want to do

I would recommend option 2 as that is the easiest to setup. Using PRE/POST scripts from DFM is not very managable in a large ENV and error handling from DFM side isnt that great.

I would do following.

1. snapcreator --profile <profile> --action pmsetup - create dataset

2. configure dataset, either import relationships or provision secondary

3. Configure SC config settings for PM

NTAP_PM_UPDATE=Y

NTAP_DFM_DATA_SET=filer1:dataset1/vol1

NTAP_PM_RUN_BACKUP=Y

The NTAP_RUN_PM_BACKUP will kick off pM job frm SC and SC will actually monitor job so you get an end to end backup and dont have to deal with different schedulers. You could in this construct still use dfm scheduler, SC scheduler, or good ol crontab or task manager.

Also there is a DB2 DR DEMO video on this community, its older but check it out, goes through setup of PM w/SC

Hope this helps

Keith

f_duranti · ‎2011-07-07

Thanks for the answer I think I'll go for the everything from SC, it seems the better way, just need some more clarification :

1. snapcreator --profile <profile> --action pmsetup - create dataset
2. configure dataset, either import relationships or provision secondary
3. Configure SC config settings for PM
NTAP_PM_UPDATE=Y
NTAP_DFM_DATA_SET=filer1:dataset1/vol1
NTAP_PM_RUN_BACKUP=Y
The NTAP_RUN_PM_BACKUP will kick off pM job frm SC and SC will actually monitor job so you get an end to end backup and dont have to deal with different schedulers. You could in this construct still use dfm scheduler, SC scheduler, or good ol crontab or task manager.
Also there is a DB2 DR DEMO video on this community, its older but check it out, goes through setup of PM w/SC

If I've understood well using this kind of configuration I will get a scenario like this: sc run the quisce/snapshot/unquiesce and then it will let DFM PM do the snapmirror/snapvault/drmirror or whatever I have to backup the data to the secondary location. Is this right? So i can have for example a Protection Manager protection policy on the SC dataset for disaster recovery with scripting for it? Is this right?

Regarding the scheduling, I'm thinking of using the SC Scheduler just to have a single point from which I can schedule all the backup but I'm not sure if the internal SC scheduler is robust enough because sometimes it seems a bit strange... I'm just testing but for example sometimes it seems to miss some backup and sometimes when the gui is restarted it started the backup that was not running for 2 weeks (but it's from SC 3.3 I've to start testing with 3.4 in the next few days).

What you mean I can schedule with dfm ? I was thinking that it will just schedule the snapshot/mirror/vault and pre/post script... it's possible to schedule the run for example of snapcreator jobs from dfm?

Just a question regarding configuration files.. it's ok to create them manually and then schedule those configs inside scgui scheduler?

Francesco