SMVI 2.0 and BE 2010

[ttrulis01]

I have several questions I hope I can get answered here.  I have both SMVI 2.0 and BE 2010 running in my environment and am wondering if it is okay that they both run, at different times of course, on virtual machines in my infrastructure. Specifcally I am thinking about the VMware tools driver and the BE agent which installs its own driver. I have been told by Symantec to remove the sync driver/vss provider and install the BE agent instead so my BE jobs will run succsesfully.  Will this mess up my SMVI backups?

Next, if an SMVI backup fails will the retention portion of the job kick off, removing any backups outside that retention, could it effectively eave you with no backups?

And finally, I have consolidated all VMs into one job in SMVI.  Is there a limit to the number of datastores you can backup simultaneously in SMVI?

Thank you for any help.

[radek_kubka]

Hi,

One quick question / comment - what are you using SMVI for? Backing up OS partitions only?

If that's the case, then getting rid of sync drivers, etc. & doing crash-consistent NetApp snapshots without VMware snapshots is fine IMHO.

Regards,

Radek

[ttrulis01]

I'm overhauling our strategy but SMVI, due to storage concerns, only holds snaps for last couple of days.  This data includes OS and files.

[radek_kubka]

So again - I reckon no VMware snapshots is fine.

Worst case scenario, you will be looking at OS disk consistency check when recovering from a dirty snapshot and (potentially) loosing / not catching in the snap some recently created open files.