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Many of our servers are using SAN volumes, so snapshotting those volumes from Hyper-V or VMware is not possible. We have installed the Windows File System agent on all those servers and are performing backups of the SAN volumes.

 

Our SAN is connected to the hosts over fibre channel.

 

Obviously it would be possible to connect one of our Commvault media agents to the fibre channel, present the volumes to it and then use the media agent to backup those volumes as a proxy. Is that advisable though? I can’t find any documentation on doing this...

Hi,

 

You would need to have at least 1 MediaAgent running under the same OS (and to the latest OS release) as the FS clients you’d like to backup. So if you have windows+linux+hpunix Itanium servers, then in this example you would need 3 MAs. Physical, also. 

You need to configure your SAN to present all the volumes to each MA, use intellisnap hardware feature, to take hardware snapshots, then run backup copies if you wish to be able to browse and restore at the file level instead of SAN volume level.

Hey @JaeDubbya,

Just wanted to clarify - are the servers you want to snap physical or virtual? or is the perceived issue that the Media Agent are virtual? I could not make it out from your original post. 

Both VMware and Hyper-V have options to use IntelliSnap if the guest VMs have SAN drives attached - but the devil is in the detail and how the configuration has been done.

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