Why use VSC for backups over snapmirror/vault

[RANJBASSI]

Hi Folks

Hope someone can advise on a question I have.

We currently have use snapmirror and snapvault to replication and perform backups of our main production filer to over to our DR site over a dedicated 100mb point to point link.

We also use VSC 4.2.1 and I also setup some backup jobs to be performed from here as well, these perform a snapmirror update as well.

The problem I am seeing is both our snapmirror and vault jobs have long lag times, snapmirrors are running every 2 hours on our volumes and we perform snapvaults once a day. plus we also run a VSC job on top of this.

Also our point to point link is saturated most of the time with these delta changes being sent to our destination filer.

To see if I can reduce down the number of large updates going across, I am tempted to stop our VSC backup and just rely on the built in SAN tools like snapmirror and snapvault for backup and replication but before I do this would I lose any benefits by not using VSC?

Many Thanks

[francisjkim]

Since VSC uses SnapMirror and SnapVault, dropping VSC out of the picture won't solve your problem, which is that your change rate is too high for your point-to-point link bandwidth.

VSC is essentially a convenience tool bringing array level management capability up to the vSphere client pane.

[RANJBASSI]

Thanks

Umm interesting all of our LUNs are VMware datastores, i am struggling to understand why there is so many changes when the VMs in those volumes themselves dont change much....

Do others who create LUNs for virtual servers also get a similar issue?

Thanks

[francisjkim]

I assume you've taken transient data changes--pagefile, swapfile, etc.--out of the mirror/backup stream?

[RANJBASSI]

Hi

Thanks for the tip.

I believe we have done this, as mentioned previously most of our volumes are presented as VMware Datastore LUNs and the page file created by VMware is held on a seperate datastore just for vswap files and this is not snapmirrored or snapvaulted.

Our volumes are also grouped based on OS, so for example we have a flexvol for our WIndows 2008, Windows 2012 etc so the windows page file should only be deduped once meaning it doesnt need to copy the page file for every VM sitting on that flexvol.

Thanks