Storage Foundation 8.0 Administrator's Guide - Windows
- Overview
- Setup and configuration
- Function overview
- About the client console for Storage Foundation
- Recommendations for caching-enabled disks
- Configure basic disks (Optional)
- About creating dynamic disk groups
- About creating dynamic volumes
- Set desired preferences
- Using the GUI to manage your storage
- Working with disks, partitions, and volumes
- Adding storage
- Disk tasks
- Remove a disk from the computer
- Veritas Disk ID (VDID)
- General Partition/Volume tasks
- Mount a volume at an empty folder (Drive path)
- Expand a dynamic volume
- Shrink a dynamic volume
- Basic disk and volume tasks
- Automatic discovery of SSD devices and manual classification as SSD
- Volume Manager space allocation is SSD aware
- Dealing with disk groups
- Disk groups overview
- Delete a dynamic disk group
- Detaching and attaching dynamic disks
- Importing and deporting dynamic disk groups
- Partitioned shared storage with private dynamic disk group protection
- Fast failover in clustered environments
- iSCSI SAN support
- Settings for monitoring objects
- Event monitoring and notification
- Event notification
- Configuring Automatic volume growth
- Standard features for adding fault tolerance
- Performance tuning
- FlashSnap
- FlashSnap components
- FastResync
- Snapshot commands
- Dynamic Disk Group Split and Join
- Dynamic disk group join
- Using Dynamic Disk Group Split and Join with a cluster on shared storage
- Dynamic Disk Group Split and Join troubleshooting tips
- Fast File Resync
- Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
- Using the VSS snapshot wizards with Microsoft Exchange
- Using the VSS snapshot wizards with Enterprise Vault
- Using the VSS snapshot wizards with Microsoft SQL
- Copy on Write (COW)
- Using the VSS COW snapshot wizards with Microsoft Exchange
- Using the VSS COW snapshot wizards with Microsoft SQL
- Configuring data caching with SmartIO
- Typical deployment scenarios
- About cache area
- Configuring SmartIO
- Frequently asked questions about SmartIO
- Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- Configuring Cluster Volume Manager (CVM)
- Configuring a CVM cluster
- Administering CVM
- Access modes for cluster-shared volumes
- Storage disconnectivity and CVM disk detach policy
- Unconfiguring a CVM cluster
- Command shipping
- About I/O Fencing
- Administering site-aware allocation for campus clusters
- SFW for Hyper-V virtual machines
- Introduction to Storage Foundation solutions for Hyper-V environments
- Live migration support for SFW dynamic disk group
- Preparing the host machines
- Configuring the SFW storage
- Administering storage migration for SFW and Hyper-V virtual machine volumes
- Optional Storage Foundation features for Hyper-V environments
- Microsoft Failover Clustering support
- Configuring a quorum in a Microsoft Failover Cluster
- Implementing disaster recovery with Volume Replicator
- Troubleshooting and recovery
- Using disk and volume status information
- Resolving common problem situations
- Commands or procedures used in troubleshooting and recovery
- Rescan command
- Repair volume command for dynamic mirrored volumes
- Additional troubleshooting issues
- Disk issues
- Volume issues
- Disk group issues
- Connection issues
- Issues related to boot or restart
- Cluster issues
- Dynamic Multi-Pathing issues
- vxsnap issues
- Other issues
- CVM issues
- Appendix A. Command line interface
- Overview of the command line interface
- vxclustadm
- vxvol
- vxdg
- vxclus
- vxdisk
- vxassist
- vxassist (Windows-specific)
- vxsd
- vxedit
- vxdmpadm
- vxcbr
- vxsnap
- vxscrub
- sfcache
- Tuning SFW
- Appendix B. VDID details for arrays
Creating the snapshot set
SFW provides support for creating snapshots for the Enterprise Vault (EV) farm, sites, VaultStore Groups, VaultStores, and components. The Enterprise Vault Snapshot Wizard integrates with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to let you create snapshots of all volumes associated with Enterprise Vault components and volumes without taking the databases offline and disrupting database operations. It also allows the Enterprise Vault Powershell cmdlet to put Enterprise Vault into backup mode. Backup mode ensures that there are no write operations involving any Enterprise Vault components and helps avoid disruption.
The resulting snapshot set provides a complete picture of the database at a point in time the snapshot was taken. You can take a snapshot with the Enterprise Vault Snapshot Wizard or the vxsnap create CLI command.
Note:
The Enterprise Vault Snapshot Wizard and vxsnap utility can be invoked from any node that has the Directory service running.
The snapshot operation can be performed at the Enterprise Vault farm, site, VaultStore Group, VaultStore, or component levels. When you right-click an Enterprise Vault object and click Enterprise Vault Snapshot from the context menu, the Enterprise Vault objects and components within (subordinate to) the selected Enterprise Vault object are all included in the snapshot. You can also add more Enterprise Vault objects from the objects shown in the Enterprise Vault Snapshot wizard.
Please note the following:
When an Enterprise Vault site is snapshotted, the Directory database is also snapshotted implicitly by the system along with the Enterprise Vault site components.
When a Vaultstore database is snapshotted, the Open Partition of that VaultStore is also snapshotted implicitly by the system.
When an Open Partition of a VaultStore is snapshotted, the Vaultstore database of that VaultStore is also snapshotted implicitly by the system.
Upon completion of the operation, the status (success or failure) of the selected components is recorded in a log, %VMPATH%\logs\EVStatus.log. The log contains information about the success or failure of the operation for the components. In the event that the snapshot of a volume for a component fails, the operation does not snapshot the remaining volumes of the component nor any other requested components that are remaining. If the operation succeeds for all the volumes of a component, then the status of the component is logged as SUCCESS. If the operation fails for any one of the volumes of the component, then the status of all the components of that Enterprise Vault server is logged as FAILED along with the cause of the failure. The status of all components that had been already snapshotted earlier before the failed component are logged as SUCCESS, and the status of the remaining components that had not been snapshotted are logged as SKIPPED.
Review the following before proceeding with the snapshot operation for Enterprise Vault:
Ensure that the execution policy is set to unrestricted. You can use the Enterprise Vault Management Shell to set the execution policy.
Ensure that the Veritas Scheduler Service is configured for all Enterprise Vault servers in the Enterprise Vault configuration.
Ensure that the component volumes or database and partition volumes have been snapshot prepared as snapshot mirrors.
The following is the procedure to create a snapshot set.
To create the snapshot set
- Using the VEA console, navigate to the Storage Agent node in the tree-view and expand the Enterprise Vault nodes under Applications.
- Navigate to the desired Enterprise Vault node.
Right-click the Enterprise Vault node and click Enterprise Vault Snapshot in the context menu.
- In the wizard, review the Welcome page and click Next.
- Specify the snapshot set parameters and then click Next
Select Component for snapshot operation
Select the component for the snapshot set
Directory
The wizard creates the snapshot set metadata XML file. The XML metadata file is stored by default in the directory shown on the screen.
There are two ways to change the XML file location.
First, edit the directory path in the Directory field for this wizard screen. Second, change the XML file location. Use a text editor to create a text file named redirect.txt. This text file should contain a single text line specifying the Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path to the location of the XML file, for example, \\ServerName\SharedFolderName. Save the redirect.txt file in the default directory, for example: C:\Program Files\Veritas\Veritas Volume Manager\VSSXML.
Snapshot set
Enter a name for the snapshot set, for example, billing or accept the default name. The wizard generates a default snapshot set name that includes the term "SnapshotSet", component name, date, and time. If multiple components are selected, "EV" is used in the default snapshot set name instead of the component name.
Select snapshot type
Select the snapshot type.
You can specify that snapshots be created as either a Full backup or Copy backup type. Either type can be used to restore a Enterprise Vault component. However, if you want to replay the logs as a part of restoring a component, a Full backup needs to have been created earlier. When replaying logs, you can replay from the time of the last Full backup. A Copy backup does not affect this sequence of log replay and therefore is often used as an "out of band" copy for purposes such as testing or data mining.
- Review the specifications of the snapshot set and click Finish.