NetApp Technology Network : Thread List - Virtualization

VIBE option "novmset" does not work

community@netapp.com — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:07:00 GMT

Hi,

Trying to configure VIBE to backup our VMware ESX 3.5 environment.

Everything is working fine, except that I can't seem to get the "--novmset" option to work. The documentation states that this options should be used to exclude certain VMs from the backup. I'm reading this to mean that no VMware snapshots should be made of the VMs listed with this option.

I'm using the option "--dsset" to specify a datastore containing (at the moment) three VMs. I'm trying to exclude one or more with "--novmset" but ALL the VMs in the datastore are getting snapshoted anyway.

No error messages in the log, everything works fine, except that the "novmset" seems to be ignored.

Anyone have any ideas?

Here's the relevant lines from the .cfg-file that is used.

# VIBE Backup Configuration File
# ------------------------------
backup

dsset=vmDC01sys01FC:172.16.2.28

novmset=STOK00736DB01
cluster=Cluster01DC01

verbose
protocol=ssh
snapname=sv_man_nightly
reportdir="E:\Backup\VIBE"

Regards,

/Ulrik

Storage vMotion in ESX 3.5 with multiple disks in multiple Datastores

community@netapp.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:14:04 GMT

I have a customer with 2 disks (VMDK files) in 2 different Datastores (VMFS,FC SAN).

The second disk is for the page file (to shring the volume, improve DeDupe and minimize Snapshot size)

The problem is we need to run Storage vMotion to migrate some of the workload to a new aggregate, but the Storage vMotion tools / plugins we found all migrate the 2 disks ot the same Datastore.

Does anyone know / have experience with a tool that will allow me to map each VMDK to a different datastore in the destination ?

Appreciate any input..

Eran B

VIBE: problem creating VM snapshot

community@netapp.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:33:43 GMT

We are using VIBE 1.0.10 on vSphere (ESX 4.0) and have a problem creating backups.

The VIBE log states for some machines:

"WARNING: Problem creating VM snapshot for ServerName!"

Some of the machines have the VMWare SyncDriver disabled, but not all.

Also the eventlog of the vCenter Server shows not more details.

Any ideas where I can look for further details (except here of course :-) ) or what might prevent the creation of a VM-snapshot?

Regards

Markus

Thin Provisioned LUN not showing true space usage

community@netapp.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:32:01 GMT

Hi. I've implemented thin provisioing for a customer's VMWare VMFS datastore LUNS. Everything in the beginning was working as expected. The space that was actually being written to (i.e. add a 30GB VM to the datastore) was being reflected on the filer. I could see this through the following command:

aggr show_space -g

The allocated and used space would be identical - as expected. Now, let's say I created that thin provisioned LUN to be 350GB. ESX would think it's getting a 350GB LUN and my space used on the filer would state 0% used. It's only as I start adding VM's does this increase the %used space...fine.

Now, let's say I've added enough VM's that the entire 350GB is used up. When I run the aggr show_space command I see 350GB allocated, 350GB used - that's fine.

Now, I vmotion a bunch of VM's from that datastore to a different datastore, leaving 100GB of VM's on the original datastore. If I take a look at the ESX datastore I now see that out of the 350GB allocated, I have 100GB used and 250GB free - nice. BUT, when I take a look at the filer and run the aggr space_show -g, I still see 350GB allocated, 350GB used - even though from a VMFS perspective this is not the case.

I'm assuming this is the same issue that I've faced before with WAFL not knowing what's happening within VMFS when VMFS frees up space. WAFL doesn't own the VMFS so it can't reflect the changes that VMFS makes when it "deletes/moves" files.

The Space Reclaimer is a nice tool that is used within Snapdrive to reclaim blocks that have been "freed", essentially passing this information to WAFL so it knows how to update the space metrics. My question (and my client's question) is how do I reclaim that space on the filer AFTER the thin provisioinmed LUN has reached a certain size and then decreases - either because a VM was destroyed or a vmotion moved it to another datastore. It would be nice if there was some Space Reclaimer feature within ESX whereby I could either manually invoke or schedule it to run against a VMFS datastore.

I know that there is now the Virtual Storage Console - a vCenter snap-in. I wonder if space reclaimer could be added to that? Seems like the perfect place to put it.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to this dilema?

Thanks

mbralign and manual grub requirements

community@netapp.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:19:18 GMT

I need to align several hundred vm's. The alignment part is simple and easily scripted.

For the grub portion that is required after alignment occurs, has anyone experimented with

options to automatically reapply grub to the vm? I am looking into possibly rolling a custom

.iso that boots + reinstalls grub once booted and then working on scripting the automatic

attachment and booting of that .iso for each vm. It's kind of backwards though...

Anyone know of a better way to automate this? The alignment makes a big difference but

running it manually across hundreds of VMs will be quite a task.

Netapp snapshots & VMWare snapshots

community@netapp.com — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:04:43 GMT

We use Netapp snapshots/snapvault as a way to take backups of VMs.

This is done using a script that does something like this:

1. look for all VMs on a datastore

2. take a VMWare snapshot of all VMs on that datastore to quiesce the .vmdk file

3. take a netapp snapshot of the datastore

4. delete all VMWare snapshots taken in step 2.

All of this is done to ensure that the .vmdk file is not written while taking a Netapp snapshot.

Now, I'm wondering: as far as I know, the NetApp snapshot is an atomic action for an entire volume. So does it actually make a difference to quiesce the VMs beforehand, given that all .vmdk files of a VM are on the same volume ?

We've been successful in restoring non-quiesced .vmdks so I'm wondering if anybody has an opinion on this.

VSC Alignments - same as mbrscan/mbralign?

community@netapp.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:23:38 GMT

Hello - I haven't had a chance to play with the new VSC yet but I noticed that it will do virtual machine alignments. I am wondering if it will have the same caveats as the existing mbrscan/mbralign tools in the Host Utilities Kit. I'm speaking about the issues like no Windows Dynamic Disks, Linux LVM's, Citrix Servers, etc.

What can you align and what should you stay away from? Have the issues chagned?

Can anybody comment on that?

Thank you!

SMVI 2.0 and snapvault

community@netapp.com — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:01:05 GMT

We are planning to utilize snapvault to retain older smvi snapshots offsite. The "recent" naming convention of the most recent snapshot was what we were looking for so we didn't have to script our snapvults. However on initial testing, it appears that the secondary filer still looks for a recent.0 snapshot. With out the ".0", the scheduled snapshots fail. We will be able to script much easier now that there is a consistent name to look for, but i was hoping that this wouldn't be necessary. Any hope that instead of SMVI naming the most recent snapshot "smvi_jobname_recent", naming it "smvi_jobname_recent.0"

SMVI 2.0 - SFR issues - unable to mount backups

community@netapp.com — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:22:00 GMT

Hi after upgrading to SMVI 2.0, i experienced some issues with the SFR feature.

First, is there a way to get some SMVI documentation? I am getting the below error messages on RestoreAgent and have no idea on there meaning.

Do we have to install Remoteagent on the destination VM, or can it be installed on any admin workstation or on the SMVI server?

Below is the message i get when starting Restore Agent console from my workstation :

"No access permissions present for guest with BIOS ID : xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx". Despite these, it starts after canceling the dialog box.

When it is installed on the destination VM (the one that needs file restore), the above message did'nt appear at Remoteagent startup, but when i try to mount a backup i get the following error message :

"Could not find SCSI disk device Port [1] - Target[1] - Bus [0] - Lun [0]"

Some considerations :

- Just to notice that my VMware storage Netapp setup is based on NFS. No iSCSI datastore were used. So does Remoteagent support VMs on NFS storage?

- For security reasons I have setup IP restrictions on the filer. Should the Restoreagent needs connecting directely to the filer or does it communicate only with the SMVI server or VCserver ?

Thks for help

SMVI 2.0

community@netapp.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:41:07 GMT

Any updates?

We have it and it's useless to us until we can name the snapshots consistently for NDMP backups. Please release it for download already!

Virtual Storage Console - unable to install

community@netapp.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:43:08 GMT

I saw VSC 1.0 was released today. I'm trying to install it on our vCenter 4.0 server..it gets almost to the end of the install, then rolls back and ends with "NetApp Virtual Storage Console for VMware vSphere setup wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified."

An MSI installer log is attached.

Logged in with a domain admin account, which is local admin and has full access on vCenter server.

Windows 2008 Enterprise x64