HI Team.
Environment has high powered media agents with all SSD that are proxy/access node/media agents. Using intellisnap. Need to configure vsa snap backup copy to use proxyless and mount the snap on the media agents and not using the esxihost. I’ve found a lot of documentation talking about it benefits and caveats but nothing that states how to actually configure it. VSA subclient forces the configure of (just 1) esxi host to act as the proxy to mount snapshots. Thank you.
Basically you need to have zoning configured for your physical servers acting as access nodes.
Reason for asking for an ESXi proxy is for VSA granular restore from snapshot when IntelliSnap enabled.
Hi Thanks for the response.
To flesh this out a bit, there is a netapp FAS8700 that has a 2nd copy of the datastore volumes and they’re read-only (it is a target of a vault replica copy from an a700 where there are vmware datastores). This FAS8700 is the source to backup copy the vmware snap volumes in question (which are read-only) to a netapp storagegrid. It appears the ESXi hosts can’t mount the volumes on the FAS8700 which of course has a negative impact on the backup copy jobs to the storagegrid. ESXi can clearly access the production vmware datastores (on an A700 and FAS500F as the vms are running); the export policy for those read-only secondary volumes (on the FAS8700) is set to just the Commvault media agents. Question: Does ESXi (hosts) really need to mount that FAS8700 read-only snap volume copy to copy the datastore volumes off the FAS8700 to the storagegrid ? Is that the only way to get the job done ?
Need to determine if the current configuration/method is how CV needs to do it (backup copy the vmware volume copy on the FAS8700 to a storagegrid by having the esx host(s) mount the read-only volumes on the FAS8700). It would be a lot of work to create the additional export policies et. al., so the Esx hosts can mount those read-only volumes on the FAS8700.
Question: Does ESXi (hosts) really need to mount that FAS8700 read-only snap volume copy to copy the datastore volumes off the FAS8700 to the storagegrid ?
No, Backup copy can be done by your physical servers acting as access nodes. We will leverage the ESXi servers when your VSA nodes are not able to mount the snapshot.
You can perform the backup copy from the FAS (Vault copy) or from the AFF (snap primary copy)
Thats great thank you it helps a lot. Can you provide doc/information on setting up the ‘zoning’ you mentioned for the media agent/access nodes/proxies ? access nodes ? Also can you speak to how that is configured in the agent/backupset/subclient level ?
Hi yes the requirement is to mount the snaps on the fas8700 that were copied over via vault replica copy from the a700. Goal is to not touch or put a load on the a700 any more than absolutely necessary.
The vault replica copy that lands on the FAS8700 is the source copy for the backup copy to the storagegrid.. The a700 source has the vmware datastores.
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