Hello
Looking for anyone who has used Commvault together with Snapvault and would like to know some best practices. I have used both Intellisnap and snapvault in the past but not together.
Here is the setup (which was setup before I joined the company).
The environment consists of 2 primary AFF and one seconday FAS for the snapvault. All backups are handled with snapshots, so no data is actually sent to the MA or a library. Commvault is only the orchestrator for snapvault and provides vCenter integration through VSA proxy.
Plans are in use, and ESX datastores are added to the plans
Backup workflow: VSA Proxy tells vCenter to do vmware application consistent snapshot, then the Array MA send commands to Netapp array to create snapshot. Vcenter then removes vm-snapshot and Commvault considers the backup job complete.
Backup copy is disabled on the storage policy, otherwise it created a snapclone from the snapshot and mounted it as a datastore and backed up the VM’s through nbd to the MA and disklibrary, Should not be a need for that since the snapshots are aux copied via snapmirror to snapvault array after the VM backup job has finished.
All works fine, I just need some input/answers for these questions:
The plan only has incremental backups, and synthetic fulls are failing due to no backup copy has been made. Should we only do Full backups? (Since everything is snapshots the full backup shouldn’t be any bigger)
When adding a new datastore to backup, I need to create the snapmirror relationship manually. Can’t Commvault create that automatically? (We are not using AIQUM yet, so Netapp arrays are setup with the SVM ipadress)
Finally a couple of more Netapp focused questions:
The Snapmirror protection policy, since Commvault handles all the scheduling, is it needed? I can’t create a relationship without choosing a policy.
Snapmirror Lag reports incorrect, even though a backup job has just been replicated and the timestamp on the snapmirror and SP_ snapshot are just minutes old, the lag time are hours. Should I even care about the lag reported by Netapp?
Thanks
