Got questions about SMVI?

[mlisa]

Our team is very interested in the questions posted on SMVI functionality, configuration, and automation … thanks for taking the time to share.  And please keep the questions and feedback on your experiences working with SMVI, good or bad, coming.  Good feedback makes for a good day, bad feedback makes for a better product J.

I also wanted to let you know that NetApp is hosting an SMVI/SRM Webcast on February 19 focusing on data protection in a VMware environment: NetApp SMVI for backup/restore and VMware SRM for disaster recovery. SDDPC Sys Admin Rick Scherer - who designed and maintains a 25 host VMware ESX 3.5 farm with well over 300 Virtual Machines, plus writes a great blog (http://vmwaretips.com/wp/) - will be joining us to describe how his team uses SMVI. There will also be a panel of folks, including best practices authors and reference architects, to address questions submitted via chat.

Webcast: http://communications.netapp.com/p/Network_Appliance/20090219140000WL?REF_SOURCE=communities

Lisa Haut-Mikkelsen

SMVI Product Manager

[mlisa]

Although the official commit date for SMVI 2.0 is still end of October, the SMVI Engineering team is working in overdrive to be able to deliver it much earlier (September).  So keep your fingers crossed :-).

SMVI 2.0 will expand the restore options to include vmdk- and file-level restores.  SMVI 3.0 will add remote backup and recovery, enabling backups to be sent to volumes other than where the VM resides and restores to be done from either local or remote backups.

[amiller_1]

Fantastic! Thanks for the info -- am looking forward to SMVI being more than GUI "VIBE" if you will (as there's lot of space for good value-add features there).

[mlisa]

More than that, SMVI backup/recovery functionality will be exposed via a "consolidated" NetApp vCenter plugin - along with cloning and provisioning (RCU), storage dashboard and configuration capabilities - end of this year.  Watch this space!

[amiller_1]

Wonderful -- will the SMVI interface be disappearing completely into a vCenter plugin interface?

And....would it be safe to assume that this will require vSphere 4.0 and up?

[mlisa]

Yes and yes :-).

[mis_admin]

are there any plans to integrate SMVI into protection manager and/or Snapvault?

From what you say is the predictable SMVI snapshot naming not going to happen until v3.0?

cheers

Zander

[radek_kubka]

are there any plans to integrate SMVI into protection manager and/or Snapvault?

This has been discussed in detail here:

http://communities.netapp.com/message/5594#5594

Regards,
Radek

[mis_admin]

I get an Unauthorised page

[radek_kubka]

Yeah, OK - the thread is within Sales Engineering community, which is restricted to NetApp folks & NetApp resellers.

There are two key take aways there though:

1) At the moment SMVI-SV integration can be done via scripting & there is an (internal) tool making this rather straight forward

2) "In a later release, we expect to integrate with Protection Manager and support PM's policies which includes SnapVault"

Hope it helps.

[mis_admin]

thanks, can I have a copy of that tool?

cheers

Zander

[radek_kubka]

As with all internal / NDA stuff - please go via your 'normal' way,  i.e. contact people you are usually dealing with either at NetApp or at your NetApp reseller.

[mis_admin]

ok, cheers for your help

[mathieu_dewavrin]

The new SMVI will be integrated directly in vCenter.

What about the integration with Protection Manager especially for the SnapVault relationships ?

[joshb]

The new snapshot naming convention is in SMVI 2.0. You won't have to wait until SMVI 3.0 for it

[djaquays0]

We just recently purchased a FAS2050 and the SMVI product and I have a question about how exactly it works.  We have roughly 40VMs running on 2 NFS datastores.  We have a couple of relatively low use Microsoft SQL servers running that occasionally have issues with the VMWare snapshots during the SMVI process.  I've read other places that the solution is to tell SMVI not to quiesce those VMs when taking its snapshot.  While this would be fine, as the databases are backed up in other ways.  I'm not sure if a single job can do the job, though.  Is there a way to make one job in SMVI take a snapshot of an entire datastore and quiesce everything but the 2-3 problem VMs?

[joshb]

Unfortunately for your situation, I believe we added the queisce flag as a backup wide flag. I do not believe it applies to individual VMs within the backup.

For you, you would need to split your backup jobs based on which ones you want queisced and which ones you do not want to be queisced.

If you are queiscing a large number of VMs in a single backup, I will suggest that you keep an eye on it. In SMVI 1.x, we create all of the VMware snapshots at once. This drives up load on the ESX server and can cause some of those VMware snapshots to fail. We will display a warning for each one that fails and you can be notified of this based on your notification settings. In SMVI 2.x, we are adding the ability to have SMVI throttle the number of VMware snapshots that are run concurrently to help resolve this problem.

Just one of those things that can creep up on you as your environment starts to process more I/Os.

[keitha]

Josh, Could Doug also not just uninstall the VMware VSS writer and/or Sync driver for those VMs? I agree fully that he may need to break the job up anyhow but if he has a small number of VMs in the datastore then just removing the Sync driver might do the trick for him.

[joshb]

That should work as well. He mentioned that he is backing them up through another mechanism, so it will depend if that backup process needs to queisce the VM or if it is more like a traditional filesystem backup.

[djaquays0]

Thanks for the information!  Currently, we only backup the database information using traditional backups, and we would be fine with continuing to use the same method.

[eric_barlier]

Hi,

I am chatting with the Vmw. team and they have a few requests, one that popped out straight away is the ability to SORT by volumen/LUN name.

I am hoping to get more info from them so we can improve SMVI further.

Cheers,
Eric

[rickwuzhere]

Hi Lisa,

You state that 3.0 will enable backups to be sent to volumes other than where the VM resides and restores to be done from either local or remote backups. Just to clarify, will we be allowed to specify the volume we want to restore to (even if different from where the VM was backed up), just as we can specify the volume we want to backup to.

You also mention a consolidated plugin, cloning and provisioning, storage dashboard, and configuration capabilities - end of this year. Is this a 2.0+ point release coming out soon after 2.0? I'm guessing 3.0 won't be ready until sometime next year.

Thanks,

-Rick