Hey all,
I've been trying to get this questioned answered by our reseller and a few others, but everyone seems to be drawing a blank.. We're a potential Netapp customer that's currently running on some older (and newer) IBM DS systems. The current situation is that we're going to decommission the older DS systems and stick with our 3 year old DS4700 system that has 19TB available for our corporate use in addition to purchasing a new Netapp filer.
Now, we're looking at a FAS2040 to be in use in addition to the DS4700. I don't believe our budget can afford a Gateway system (plus all the licenses for SMVI, etc.)
Our current VM storage policy is to separate the System (OS) disk from the Data disk (on different VMFS volumes).
Now what I want to know is:
Can SMVI backup (and subsequently do restores and more important;y, file-level restores) of VMs if the Netapp volumes only contain the DATA partitions from the VMs (and NOT the System disks, configuration info, etc.)?
One such example I can give would be for a massive file server we have (4TB) that would have it's OS partition on the fast FC disk and the data partition on the FAS2040. To illustrate:
MyFileServer:
- Disk 1: 25GB OS Partition - Located on VMFS_OS1 on the DS4700
- Disk 2: 1TB DATA Partition - Located on VMFS_DATA10 on the FAS2040
- Disk 3: 1TB DATA Partition - Located on VMFS_DATA10 on the FAS2040
- Disk 4: 1TB DATA Partition - Located on VMFS_DATA10 on the FAS2040
- Disk 5: 1TB DATA Partition - Located on VMFS_DATA10 on the FAS2040
I want to know if using the built-in SMVI tools to restore if I'll be able to use the FLR agent in the VM to mount the backup I want (knowing full well it will only contain the data partition).
Can someone give me a definitive answer on this? It's quite important for our purchase decision and if this is not possible, I may have to find some other alternative, or find some extra funds to try and justify a gateway system. I'm not looking for criticism on how we manage our VMFS datastores or VM policies. I'm just looking to see if this is possible.
Many thanks if you can shed some light on this situation.
