Thanks, this is what we were thinking of doing, so it's good to hear it's working for others. I'm hearing from vendors that 50 VM's per datastore is a good number. We were hoping for larger datastores (most of our VMs are Windows <50GB or Linux <100GB), but that would probably end up with too many VM's to handle effectively.
I'm thinking weekly quiesced backups and daily basic snapshots would probably work well. We have a bunch of MS SQL VM's -- they need special handling, naturally, but they have their own datastores anyway. -Adam On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Ray Van Dolson <rvandol...@esri.com> wrote: > Yes, we still do quiesce the VM's -- but perhaps avoid some of the > issues you've seen by having more numerous, smaller FlexVol datastores > (usually around 5TB max). We had to work with our Compute team to kind > of re-work things to accommodate backup workflows to minimize > disruption. > > I'd guess there are on average around 50 VM's per volume. All are not > necessarily backed up, so the backup footprint is fairly distributed > across volumes. > > Note: We do complement this by having a couple days worth of "dirty" > (e.g. non-quiesced) storage snaps of each volume. In practice this has > worked well for spot recovery. System typically boots up as if it had > crashed which we've found is typically fine for all but the most > sensitive workloads. Then we can just FlexClone the volume to get > things back up and running quickly and Storage vMotion the "recovered" > VM out. > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 09:41:36AM -0400, Adam Levin wrote: > > Interesting. How is that different from just taking regular snapshots? > Don't > > you still have to quiesce the VMs before taking the flexclone? How many > VMs per > > volume do you have? > > > > -Adam > > > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 9:32 AM, Ray Van Dolson <rvandol...@esri.com> > wrote: > > > > We use CommVault + NetApp + FlexClone (Intellisnap). As long as you > > schedule things so you only end up taking one FlexClone per volume > per > > cycle, it works quite well. The time to roll back the VMware level > > snapshots becomes very small. > > > > Ray > > >
_______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
