SMSAP, SnapVault, releasing SnapVault relationships? What next?

[jakub_wartak]

Hello folks,

Let's suppose i have SMSAP with Protection Manager. We have production on netappA and netappV for vaulting. SMSAP hot-backups happens every 8h, One SMSAP backup is vaulted every 24h

So we have this scenario:

1) monday 00:00, SMSAP takes snapshot

2) monday 08:00, SMSAP takes snapshot

3) monday 16:00, SMSAP takes snapshot, sent to Vault (at 16:30?), Vault now has {mon 16:00}

4) tue 00:00, SMSAP takes snapshot

5) tue 08:00, SMSAP takes snapshot

6) tue 16:00, SMSAP takes snapshot, sent to Vault (at 16:30?), Vault now has {mon 16:00, tue 16:00}

7) wed 00:00 SMSAP takes snapshot

😎 disaster happens, we need to restore to point "5", tue 08:00

Procedure would be to restore the backup using SMSAP, it would detect that snapshot is on primary, but would refuse to revert it because of SnapVault relationships (it is not overridable check). So we need to see what volumes are part of DataSet for this database and issue "snapvault release" for them , right? (this breaks snapvault relationship). So again we launch SMSAP revert back to tue 8:00 and.... <drums> .... we've primary at tue 8:00 Everyone is happy , but i'm not:

The problem & questions:

A) We've broken the SV relationships, what is the next action?

A1) to reinitialize? That would render all hot-backups on Vault useless ? We cannot do that because Vault needs to have much more hot-backups that are needed by us...

A2) to reactivate the SV relationship? How it is possible ? In valut we have {mon 16:00, tue 16:00}, but we don't have tue 16:00 on primary..... ?

B) How Protection Manager reacts to breaking SV relationship in Datasets? Is anything needs to be done you can think of?

I would be thankful for any hints.

-Jakub.

[anandr · Accepted solution]

Hi Jakub,

When was your SnapVault relationship initially created?  Am assuming the baselining happened before Monday 00:00.

In your case since you are restoring from a Snapshot taken after the baseline Snapshot, i don't see a reason why the SV relationship will be broken.  Have u tried this?

SMSAP prevents a "Fast Restore" only if you are trying to do a fast restore/vol restore from a Snapshot created earlier than the baseline Snapshot.  This can still be overridden if RBAC is enabled in which case SMSAP will break the SV relationship.

Anand.