yyaazz's tech thoughts

I’ve already shown a couple of features of the NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC). With this post I start to present the backup and restore related stuff. For backup and recovery the VSC 2.0.1 integrates (and the installer actually installs) the SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure. With SMVI the NetApp created snapshots can be handled more efficiently.

Simplify management and increase productivity for your backup, restore, and disaster recovery operations in a VMware environment.

I like using NetApp technology instead of the standard snapshots in vSphere, because

• I can have a lot of snapshots without performance issues
• I can mount the snapshot and have single file restore
• I can integrate with SnapMirror, and restore on the remote site

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The new version of the Data ONTAP Simulator 8 has been out for a few days. I was waiting for it because 8.0.1 has finally VAAI (VMware vStorage API for Array Integration) support and we can test it in a lab environment. The Simulator 8 is a little bit different from the older ones, it comes as a configured VMware Workstation (or Fusion) VM. As I have ESXi lab only, I had to convert it to Virtual Infrastructure VM, with VM Converter. After the Converter Standalone Client finished, I powered on the Simulator and now it’s much more like the real Filers.

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In my last post, I’ve created a lot of clones of a virtual machine. Cloning takes a lot of time and wastes a lot of storage space. With Data ONTAP there’s an other way to create clone, which is much more efficient: Rapid Cloning Utility for VMware. RCU is able to quickly create a large number of Virtual Machines with a small storage footprint.

With VSC (Virtual Storage Console) vSphere administrator can have all of the storage functions within the vSphere GUI. No additional login required to the storage via HTTP/SSH or GUI, the funcions are available where applicable.

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As a partner engineer I usually play a lot with the NetApp simulator (version 7.3.4 today) to test the Data ONTAP functions. As the simulator is not too big – can contain up to 25 1 Gbyte disks – I wanted to play test how many VMs can be stored on this.

My lab runs vSphere 4.1 with virtual ESXi 4.1 VMs on the top of an ESXi 4.1. The datastore is NFS, 10 Gbyte with 20% snapshot reservation, so it can store 8 Gbyte of data. I created a simple linux VM, 1 vCPU, 256MB ram and 1 Gbyte of disk (as it’s the default, I’ve let VMware to make thin provisioned disk). I’ve installed Debian 5.0 32bit on it, and finally I get my VM with a ~600MB filesystem. As it’s thin provisioned, the footprint on the storage is around the same as the filesystem.

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