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

[brendanheading]

Thank you for that, Keith. VSC looks like a great product today but I will, of course, be watching that pipeline eagerly Having the virtualization backed up under the control of Protection Manager will be something quite special.

[collieritops]

We had an email misconfiguration issue yesterday and all the job status notification emails didn't make it to us. Now we're having a difficult time figuring out which jobs were failed/success last night and we require this information. We've opened a support case and uploaded the logs but they don't seem confident about being able to get this information either.

Is there really no other source for this info in the logs? How difficult is it to retrieve it? We have 20+ SMVI jobs daily. I can't imagine the notification emails are the only place...they should be as the name implies, simply a notification and not the source for job status. For a data protection product, this is critical.

[keitha]

I'm sorry hear about the troubles. With the current release the logs are going to be your best source of information. We have a log viewer tool located here  http://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/tools/logviewer/

Another thing you could quickly do is check the NetApp controller to see the time stamps on the SMVI backup jobs. This won't show you if you had any VMware snapshot failures but you would then know you at least have all the VMs backed up on the storage array.

Keith

[bcnnetapp]

You could also check the VSC plug-in GUI, specifically the Backup and Recovery > Backup > All Backup Jobs list which has real-time view of schedule status and "Last Run Status". But I agree in the future update release of VSC 2.0.1 the addition of a more robust "reporting" engine for VSC Backup and Recovery module would be very helpful. script out to run a daily report against the SMVI logs and report back all backup jobs, last run status, time stamp, etc.