VSC plugin

[ksmpu1]

Hi all,

I've recently acquired a new position within my school district and have inherited a FAS2240, DS2246, and a FAS2220 as a DR. I'm very new to NetApp so please excuse my ignorance in some areas.

With that being said, I'm curious about the VSC plugin. Each of our two controllers contain 4-5 NFS volumes. Snapshots are currently configured for each volume within OnCommand. With this setup as I understand it, I cannot backup and restore individual VMs or individual files from .vmdk's. However, with VSC this is possible. My question is, does it sound okay to remove the current snapshot configurations and just rely on VSC? It sounds like VSC takes a snapshot at the volume level anyways, so it seems that it would essentially be the same setup as I have now, except for the backup/restore of individual VMs ability. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[jkoelker01 · Accepted solution]

We removed the snapshot ability at the volume level and rely solely on VSC to maintain our backups of our virtual machines. It gives you the ability to restore the server or individual files and is very quick. Another reason we removed the snapshotting is that we do tape backups of the volumes nightly as well as snapmirroring to our DR device. The plugin is very set it and forget it in terms of backups. It will email you if they fail which rarely happens.

[ksmpu1]

Thanks for the info, jkoelker01, and sorry for the late response. 

I've become concerned with backups because several of the districts near us have recently been compromised with some sort of ransomware. I'm trying to adopt the 3-2-1 rule.

When you say that you, "do tape backups of the volumes nightly", how are you doing this? Does your tape backup solution integrate with NetApp? At one time, this district used tape backups, and I'm wanting to get it going again. There's some sort of comfort in knowing that you're data is backed up on something tangible.

We have snapmirroring to a DR at another physical location, as well. So, the VSC backups are the only data that's getting backed up to your DR, correct?

---

@jkoelker01 wrote:

We removed the snapshot ability at the volume level and rely solely on VSC to maintain our backups of our virtual machines. It gives you the ability to restore the server or individual files and is very quick. Another reason we removed the snapshotting is that we do tape backups of the volumes nightly as well as snapmirroring to our DR device. The plugin is very set it and forget it in terms of backups. It will email you if they fail which rarely happens.

---

[jkoelker01]

We use Dell's netvault product to do tape backups of our volumes. It works via the NDMP plugin. Doing the tape backup with NDMP gives us the ability to do single file restores as well as full volume restores. If you don't have any software solution to do this with you can hook a tape drive directly up to your filer if you have the right connections to do so and just do direct dumps of your volumes but I believe you lose the ability to do single file restores.

For our snapmirrors, we are snapmirroring the entire volume and not just the VSC snapshots. The volume was snapmirrored initially at the production site and then moved to the DR site to only have the changed data transferred. This allows us to quickly add our servers back into our vm environment and go at our DR site.