Adam> The challenge right now isn't so much on the NetApp side but on the VMWare side.
Adam> Typical sequence of events: Adam> 1) get list of VMs on datastore X Adam> 2) quiesce all VMs on datastore X Adam> 3) snapshot datastore X via NetApp mechanism Adam> 4) un-quiesce all VMs on datastore X Adam> What happens is that step 2 takes about 30 seconds per VM. Adam> While the VMs are quiesced, they are effectively using VMWare's Adam> snapshot mechanism to store changed blocks until the NetApp Adam> snapshot is done. Step 3 takes a couple of seconds -- not an Adam> issue. Step 4, then, has to roll through each VM and remove the Adam> VMWare snapshot. The problem here is that the longer they are Adam> quiesced, the longer they take to come back. By the time we're Adam> near the last few VMs, they are taking a long time to roll Adam> forward and commit those VM snapshot changes. Adam> We have the option of not quiescing (man, that word gets harder Adam> to type every time) the VMs and just taking a netapp snapshot, Adam> which may or may not be fully restorable. I'm curious if anyone Adam> else is doing that. We're going to have the same type of problem down the line too, and I've used CommVault (on FC SAN volumes), a little bit of Veeam, and we're moving to Netbackup with Snapmanager on NFS datastores. To me, the best thing you could do is to just make more smaller datastores so that you have fewer VMs per datastore. It's not ideal in alot of ways, but maybe if you have so many VMs per-datastore, it's the best option? I also think that our VMware guys are also gambling that on most VMs they can do a restore even if they do a backing store snapshot on the Netapp (cDOT 8.2.x) in alot of cases. I do the Netapp side of the house, not as much on the VMware side day to day. Is there anyway to parallelize the ESX side, so that it finds the VMs and then does three or four of them at a time? Esp if they are on seperate ESX hosts, that should be doable. But it's an interesting problem and I don't have a solution either. John _______________________________________________ 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/
