I have 3 ESX 3.5 servers connected in a DRS cluster with a VC 2.5 environment. They all share 1 750gb Volume on my Equallogic San. I am currently using about 120gb and making snapshots of this volume once a week. When I tested mounting the snapshot in my ESX environment it worked perfectly. I set the LVM to 1, scanned for new storage, the snap lun showed up in the LUN display and the snap volume showed up in the datastores (under configuration). After I was done testing, I removed the snap volume from the datastore, made the snapshot offline via Equallogic interface - then rescanned the LUN's to remove it there also. And then I set the LVM to 0.
The next day I went in to load the same snapshot with the same procedure and the rescan worked (the LUN showed up) however the volume didn't show up under the datastores (storage config tab). When I go to add storage it sees the LUN, however it wants me to reformat it - as it thinks that it is empty.
When I create a NEW snapshot - with the same procedure - everything works fine, the first time.
Can anyone explain why this is happening - losing those snapshots is not a huge deal because nothing is broken - however, I am planning a backup strategy behind this and want it to work perfectly before I get too carried away here.
The production servers are being backed up right now via symantec and the equallogic is making a snapshot once a week for all the VMDK files, I am planning on offloading these backups onto a NAS (cheaper storage) for a few months - this is why the mounting is fairly important to me.
Thanks
