Scheduling on large multi database installations

[heinowalther]

Hi there

I have been working with SMSQL and SME for quite a long time, and I am still perplexed by the fact that the overall design of the scheduling are made the way that is is...

It present a few problems in larger installations, let me give you an example...

Say you have 20 SQL Servers with SMSQL installed and running, they have all been scheduled using the Windows scheduler.

Something happens so that all your backups fail, in my case it can be that the SnapVault target site is down...  so I need to restart start that backups on the 20 servers, of cause I could just fire up DFM and do a "Backup Now" on each dataset, but that woud become an inconsistent snapshot which I cannot restore from inside SMSQL...

So basically I need to either login to each server, restart the Windows Scheduler job... or connect to the scheduler from my management PC via the MMC plugin... sadly you can only connect to one server at a time... so it's to say the least, not an easy task.... 🙂

The schedules are shown in the SMSQL GUI (and SME), but you cannot right-click and start it for some reason 🙂

I would like to know how other administrators solve this in larger datacenters ?

I am aware that NetApp has a few solutions to this called Snap Creator Framework or Workflow Automation, but is that the only way to manage this?

The way I have "solved" this, was to google a bit, and ended up with something like this:

$ServerList = get-content Servers.txt

Foreach ($server in $serverlist)

{

write-host $server -fore green

SCHTASKS /Run /s $Server /U <UserName> /P <Password> /TN TaskName

}

A simple powershell script where you put your affected servers in the servers.txt file, and run the script..  it requires that all servers schedule is called by the same name...

A quick fix, maybe it can help someone out there, but I'm really looking for something a bit smarter, and how knows, maybe the SnapManager and DFM will get to work a bit closer in the future, so that the "Backup Now" button would trigger a SnapManager backup insted of just a snapshot of the dataset pointed to...

/Heino

[GRAEMEOGDEN]

I haven't used this myself, but have you looked at the federated backup option in SMSQL?

https://communities.netapp.com/blogs/abhishek/2012/12/27/federated-backup-in-snapmanager-for-sql

[heinowalther]

Well, with federated backups you are able to select several SQL Instances and servers, and do one backup job.

I also haven't used it, but I it looks like it still uses the Windows Scheduler.

Also this is only for the SQL server, and not for Exchange.

It might be a solution, but then again, I think it is supposed to be used if you had SQL servers which has some kind of cooperation which needs snapshots to be executed at all servers at the same time.

I do not think this is something we can use in our setup.   One also has to look out, not to schedule every SQL server to run backups at the same time...  one thing is the snapshot action, which puts load on the netapp, but the log-copying from log drive to the snapinfo drive uses a lot of IOs..

So at the present we have put servers into 5 different groups which uses different schedule times... so we run about 10 SQL backups per filer at one time...

/Heino