I'm not sure about your first question. The cloning done by VSC in a NAS environment works on a VMDK file level, which obviously is inside of the LUN in a SAN environment. Perhaps the VSC guide will go into more detail about the provisioning and cloning requirements when using SAN. On your second question - we've tried this kind of thing before but the problem is that VMware will not start a virtual machine if any of the VMDK's are not writable, which, of course, in a snapshot they are not. Your other option regarding cloning of VMs is to use VMware's View Composer which allows, I believe, the creation of "linked clones". This, however, requires the enterprise level license of View and I don't think can be used in conjunction with VSC. Hope this helps a little. Richard ... View more

Personally I would recommend storing virtual disks for swapfiles in a separate datastore from the other VM files. We primarily do this (over NFS) so we never end up backing up this kind of "transient" data. If you do this you should consider marking those virtual disks as "independent" and "persistent" so that VM snapshots do not get taken of those virtual disks. Richard ... View more

This is a known bug in Ops Mgr 4.0 - you need to upgrade to 4.0.1 (or later). Richard ... View more

So it looks like DFM is not picking up the qtree quota information. Ensure you are running DFM 4.0.1. There was a bug in 4.0 related to XML authentication that meant it wasn't picking up the qtree sizes. Other than that, run the connectivity test in DFM for that filer. Make sure it can authenticate on SSH and XML. I know this works because I have DFM successfully doing what you want. Richard ... View more

The report in DFM you need is "qtrees-capacity". This seems like a very simple answer - perhaps I'm missing your point? ... View more

The times I've seen an IP address work where a hostname doesn't is usually when name resolution is not working. It depends what is doing the name resolution. If it's only DNS then there could be an entry in the local hosts table pointing to the wrong IP address. Can you ping the DNS alias of the filer? If you are still using WINS and NetBIOS on your clients then you will need to add that alias using the "cifs nbalias" command on the filer. I can't remember if that requires a restart of the cifs service or not. You will also need to enable WINS on the vif. If that doesn't do it then I don't know. Try a packet trace both with the IP address and with the alias and see what the differences are? ... View more

Not much information to go on here, Bobby. Things I would do to diagnose: Does "nslookup alias" give you the same IP address? Are you using NetBIOS in your environment? If so, you may need the "cifs nbalias" command to set up NetBIOS aliases on the filer. ... View more

This will vary depending upon how you're getting the dump to tape. Using Netbackup (6.5) for example, you can place the following into the backup selections in an NDMP policy:     set type = smtape     /vol/volname Note that this causes a snapshot to be taken on the volume which won't automatically be deleted. It has to be deleted manually or scripted. If you are looking for methods of doing an initial snapmirror transfer you should also consider the LREP tool (on the NOW site). I've never used it but it can be used to create a copy of the volume on removable media for transporting to a remote site. HTH, Richard ... View more

When you run an NDMP dump the filer will take and use a snapshot of the volume which will be held as busy until the dump is completed. So, you cannot have corruption when another snapshot is scheduled. What I don't know, however, is how SMVI and/or Snapvault will react to a busy snapshot. I believe a busy snapshot can be renamed without affecting anything? Richard ... View more

I agree this would be useful to have in Ops Manager. We currently rely on the "volume almost full" and "volume full" alerts but those are in percentages so we have to adjust them. It would also be nice if the volume autogrow functionality can be modified to ensure a certain percentage amount free in the volume rather than space available. I think snap autodelete can work from a percentage? ... View more

My advice: bite the bullet and convert (copy/move) everything to qtrees. I think if you access the root of the volume via CIFS you should be able to move an entire folder tree from the root of the volume into a new qtree in a matter of seconds? Richard ... View more

Yes, the DFM/Ops Manager admin guide contains details about how to customize the email that is sent. Richard ... View more

Netapp Operations Manager has this functionality although it may or may not fit your environment. Among other things, it assumes that all your users are in a single email domain. It works for us but may not for you. Plus you have to pay for Operations Manager of course. Your alternative is possibly to trap SNMP notices about quota usage and I thought at one point there was a sample script on the NOW site for doing some kind of quota notification. Richard ... View more

Personally I really really dislike using mixed security on a qtree precisely for these reasons. If you can use a CIFS/SMB client on your Unix side you will probably find it easier all round. Richard ... View more

You may well need to create the share at the qtree level and access it that way. Did you try that? Richard ... View more

Sounds like you need persistent binding. Most, if not all, FC HBA drivers include such a feature.  (Edit: ugh, that wikipedia page is not very good, you should be able to find better info than that). Richard ... View more

To be honest I've never seen this issue with NTFS on Netapp before. Netapp's implementation seems to be very reliable. What do you get if you run the following: icacls \\netapp\l$ substituting for your own names, of course. ... View more

You should be able to break the inheritance on the troublesome folder. Properties>Security>Advanced>Change Permissions then uncheck "include inheritable permissions from this object's parent". You should probably then select "Add" to make sure you keep everything you expect, then you should be able to remove the permissions you don't need. HTH, Richard ... View more

As pure backup-to-disk appliances these devices are fine. However, from my point of view, the biggest difficulty with backup in general is time taken to copy a dataset from primary storage to secondary/backup storage. I'm sure these devices do inline compression and deduplication just fine but they rely upon full copies of the data to get those results. We use Snapvault and OSSV to a fairly good extent here. This allows for the equivalent of full backup copies by transferring only deltas across the network. This significantly reduces the time required to perform backups, especially if your data is not significantly changing from one day to the next. The primary data is also hit less hard when doing backups, which is important if you're a 24 hour business and don't want to impact operations. Datasets are continually growing in size but there is no more time in a day for repeatedly copying the same data over and over from one storage medium to the next... Just my thoughts. Richard ... View more

Check your SMSQL logs for the most recent backup. Those should indicate what the failures were. I'm assuming the databases are correctly configured for an archive backup? If you are using Netapp Management Console you should also be able to check on the last job that ran under that protection policy, if it got that far. Richard ... View more

SMSQL quieces the database(s) then takes a snapshot on the primary using Snapdrive. It then uses Snapdrive to communicate with Protection Manager which then starts the snapvault transfer using the snapshot on the primary just taken. You can define your own protection policy that doesn't have a throttle set. It just has to be a policy that does the equivalent of "remote backup only". Richard ... View more

New partitions created using Windows 2008 are correctly aligned. However, if you do an UPGRADE (assuming this is possible) and your partition was not previously aligned, it will not become magically aligned. I have had little success with running mbralign with a Windows 2008 partition, so make sure the partition is aligned before you do the upgrade. Also, you may have limited success with P2V. I seem to recall an instance in the past where we ran P2V on a Windows 2008 server and it resulted in misaligned VMDK's which we didn't seem to be able to fix. Richard ... View more