StoreVault S500 & VCB

[Ray_T]

What I have: (2) ESX Servers, (1) Virtual Center Server, (1) VCB Server, (1) StoreVault S500 SAN, all using iSCSI.

ESX Version: 3.0.2 Update 1

VCB Version: 1.0.3

S500 Version: 7.0.3S8

According to the VCB documentation the VCB server needs to have access to LUNs in order to back them up; that sounds logical. With that in mind I would need to assign both HBAs, ESX server HBA and the VCB server HBA, to the same LUN. The StoreVault S500 does not let me perform that type of action, the S500 allows me to create initiator groups however according to the StoreVault techs this is really just a mapping of an 'unfriendly name' of a IQN to a 'Friendly Name'; which is the group name I create. I can however attempt to map two HBAs to an initiator Group however the SAN management software throws errors such as ' Error 9006: Not a valid iSCSI node name', even though I receive the error it still lets me map the HBA to the LUN. My question is does anyone have a S500 and know how to work around its limitations in order to allow the VCB server to see the same LUNs that both my ESX server see? At this point I’m very frustrated with the StoreVault S500 and its limitations, all i really wanted to do is perform hot image level backups and send them to tape as part of a DR solution. One of the techs told me to just buy another S500 and replicate between them, yeah let’s spend another 10K for 2nd device...

Any help would be much appreciated...

[dalepa]

I'm not sure about the VCB issue; I'm suprised that Netapp support can't answer this question.

Also, have you tried to use NDMP on the S500? This will give you a crash recoverable hot backup of all your VMs

S500 for DR is really the answer... Where are you going to restore tapes if your production S500 goes down? If it's ok the be down for a few days, I guess tape would be cheaper...

I'de replace the tape system and VCB server with another S500...

dp

Why VMware over Netapp NFS

[Ray_T]

dalepa, thanks for the reply.

Firstly the StoreVault is a division of NetApp, it is not NetApp. When i call support i speak with StoreVault Techs that have nothing to do with NetApp, there seems to be a clear distiction between the two companies even though StoreVault is a NetApp division. Unfortunately they've been working on this for a while and they suggested i contact VMWare support for this however it states the following in the VMWare Backup documentation regarding using VCB and a SAN " The VCB proxy must have access to storage LUNs managed by ESX Server systems. This is accomplished by adding the VCB proxy to the same fabric zones that ESX Server systems belong. For more information, see documentation provided by your SAN storage array and switch vendors, as well as the SAN Configuration Guide." It appears to me that StoreVault would need to be the ones to explain to me how to give access to multiple HBA's to the same LUN on their SAN, am i wrong? The StoreVault Management interface is really geared towared SMB so i do not have the ability to do more that what the software allows me to do...

As far as NDMP, that is certainly an option with Backup Exec... $900 for Backup Exec and $1800 for the NDMP option, however that would not get me a crash consistant backup which i believe to be the better then crash recoverable backup.

Purchasing another S500 is not the answer due to costs as well as if i put the second S500 in the same building is that really a DR solution, what if the building burns to the ground? I have another corporate site that is considered our Backup Site of which i have hardware in place to install ESX and fire up the VM's i restore from tape.

All my VMWares are going to be stored on individual RDM Volumes, 1 VM per LUN, to take advantage of the SAN Snapshot software. If i had to roll back a single VM i could restore my snapshot easily, if i was to put multiple VM's on the same LUN i would have to restore the whole LUN affecting multiple VM's.

So my plan was in addition to the ongoing SAN snapshotting of LUNs i would also pull a clean backup, no transient data, using VCB and lay the data to tape for DR purposes. I would basically schedule the backups every day and archive the tapes off site.

I'm assuming that everything will work as i desribed above however I beleive the missing pieces to the puzzle is that my VCB server needs to access the LUNs of which only my vendor can advise me on how this is done...

Ray

[dalepa]

So im assuming that you have zoned (using your SAN mgmt software) in your VCB server to the same zone as your ESX host? I don't think the S500 is the issue, you need to add the VCB server into the same zone as the S500 lun using your SAN mgmt software...

Any reason not to use NFS on the S500? Much easier and just as fast...

dp

Why VMware over Netapp NFS

[willrodbard]

Ray,

I have also come across the same issue with our S500, it seems to eb that when you cretae the LUN you specify which O/S will be using it, if you select VMware, then a windows box can't see it, and vice-versa, you can't even add the MS iSCSI initiator name in to the group along with the others that are already configured to see the VMFS volume. I will be contacting our StoreVault app shortly and will let you know how I get along mate. If you get anywhere please post, i'll keep an eye on this thread

ta

Will.

[JRink]

I dont use VBC, and don't really know anything about it, but I ran into a similiar thing with my S500. I had a VMWare LUN created and it was accessed from my main PROD ESX host via iSCSI. I also have a DEV ESX box that I attempted to connect via iSCSI and got it to connect.... However, when I rebooted my PROD ESX host, it could no longer access the iSCSI SAN. I ended up having to disconnect the iSCSI connection from my DEV box before the PROD box would connect again.

I spoke with Storevault and they said this is because you can only connect a single host to a LUN, not both. That kinda sucked. I don't know if this has changed in the new software releases that have recently come out or not... ?

I plan to upgrade my software for the S500 this coming week.

[willrodbard]

Ray,

As promised I have a bit more info for you, at least what i did to overcome the problem. 1st though this is what the Store Vault techie at the re-sellers told me (not sure if he is a Store Vault employee or not😞

"VMware 3.5 is not validated, but rather 3.02 is." later he went on to say that this means that it hasn't been tested by them due to VMware not having tested it so they can't recommend it either?

Our Environment consists of:

VMware:

3 x ESX 3.5 (with qlogic HBA's)

Virtual Center Server 2.5.0 Build 64192

1 x Physical Windows Server 2003 SP2 R2 (now also a vm windows 2003 server with vcb installed which we successfully tested this on)

Store Vault S500

Store Vault Manager Version 3.0.1.0

ONTAP SVE Version: NetApp Release 7.5.3S8: Tue Aug 28 02:29:51 PDT 2007

Basically I had to install the Store Vault manager software on to a machine that has access to all of out seperate LANs, this being the VC Server (due to us not having sorted out our VLANs yet)

Then I had to remove any Initiator groups and any LUNs that were no longer being used, for some reason this seemed to be stopping me from adding new iSCSI names to existing groups. Also I had to remove any existing connections to the VMFS LUN

Next I created a new initiator group, aned it and selected "iSCSI" and "VMware" and copied from a text file all of the initiator names in to it, seperated by a carriage return, shown below

iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:pnsvcbtest (vm windows server)

iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:pnsvcbproxy.pns.local (physical windows server)

iqn.2000-04.com.qlogic:esx1

iqn.2000-04.com.qlogic:esx2

iqn.2000-04.com.qlogic:esx3

And that was it, I can't tell you how many times I tried this originally for it to suddenly work. I have a feeling that it worked due to me removing the original iSCSI connections that were in place and started from scratch.

It is a little bit worrying though that Stiore Vault don't support VCB over iSCSI with ESX 3.5 but hopefully they will do soon

I know this probably isn't the complete answer you were after, and I really hope you managed to sort this one out by now.

feel free to PM me if you need any more info

cheers

Will.

[willrodbard]

JRink, thanks mate, see my last post a bit of progress has been made

How Bizarre that the Store Vault guy said that, maybe it is down to the version of the software\firmware it is running, I have 3 x esx3.5 hosts and 2 windows boxes all connected to the same LUN via iSCSI at the same time. (see my last post

It all seems to come back to the way that the initiator groups are created and what you already have in existance.

if you can get away with it I would try to unmap then tdelete the single initiator group that you have set up for your prod or dev box then create a new one with both initiator names in it, then you should be able to connect both to the same LUN at the same time

hope this help?

Will.

[infuseweb]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but wow, this is the EXACT issue I'm running into and it's now almost 1 1/2 years later! And it hasn't been fixed by Storevault. Oh, and whaddayaknow, they killed off the Storevault line. Surprise, surprise!

So I still can't add a single Microsoft iSCSI initiator to an existing vmware initiator group (on an S550, nonetheless). But I can't kill the existing group to recreate it with the new initiator because it's a very active group with three hosts across 6 HBA's in a balanced configuration so deleting the group will create all kinds of disasters. And who knows what vmware will do with the paths if I do that.

Time to move on to a better SAN I guess. I could tell you stories...