SMVI "Sign On" Questions

[mlisa]

Bill Holland has a few questions he'd like to "throw out" to the NetApp Virtualization Community ...

1. What will trigger the need to regenerate the credentials file for SMVIi?

2. Is there a way to not have to pass username and password on the command line for sv-smvi?

[hollandwl]

Another issue I have uncovered is that 'smvi backup delete' will allow you to delete snapshots that are snapvaulted thus breaking a snapvault and requiring re-initialization of the snapvault relationship. Anyway to have 'smvi backup delete' check the status of the underlying filer snapshot and disallow deletion if it is part of a snapvault?

[rmatt]

One possibility is to simply use the SMVI CLI to perform your backups and eliminate scheduling through the GUI. It would require a small script but would let you maintain full control of SMVI backups and other scripts (like SV-SMVI) all in one place. I'll post something to my blog this evening to show how to do the snapshot rotations with SMVI.

[hollandwl]

We won't be using the scheduler to do our backups. We use a product from BMC Software called Control-M to run all our routine tasks and would use it to run smvi command line backups. The main advantage Control-M gives is the ability to perform tasks based on other events rather than simply on time. This way we can take our backups immediately before or after key events in the daily processing cycle to better provide known recovery points.

[rmatt]

Hi, Bill. I've put a sample script for SMVI CLI backups in my Service Bytes blog . Thanks,

--Matt

[joshb]

1. Which credential file? There are two in SMVI. One contains items like your credentials to the filers and VirtualCenter. The other contains the current users credentials.
   The credential file that contains filers information should not need to be changed until those accounts/passwords change which is probably rare. Or a new filer comes online that SMVI need sto know about.
   The credential file for the current user only needs to change if the password changes.
2. Take a look at the thread http://communities.netapp.com/thread/2572 . I believe the discussion might help you as well. In the end, they went with setting the APPDATA environment variable inside of their scheduled script since it did not appear to be set by Windows.

[hollandwl]

The credentials file that gets created the first time you run SMVI CLI.

We are required to change passwords every 60 days and cannot re-use any of the last 24.

[joshb]

We did not include an easy way for you to reset this password within SMVI. The only solution we have right now is to actually remove that particular credential file and then SMVI will re-prompt you for a password. This file is found in <Users Application Data directory>/NetApp/smvi/1.0/client/.