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Veritas CloudPoint Administrator's Guide

Last Published: 2020-06-04

Product(s): CloudPoint (2.2.2)

Platform: Linux

Creating a snapshot manually

One of CloudPoint's most important features is the ability to create snapshot policies. These policies let you take snapshots of specific assets on a regular schedule.

However, you can also take a snapshot of an asset manually. That is, you can navigate to a particular asset at any time and create a snapshot.

The types of snapshots you can create vary depending on the asset type. Review the following table:

Table: Assets and supported snapshot types

Asset	Supported snapshot types
Dell EMC Unity array	Copy-on-write (COW) snapshots on LUNs
HPE storage arrays	COW and clone snapshot types Note the following: HPE 3PAR Virtual Copy Software is responsible for the snapshot operation. You can have 500 snapshots per volume. 256 can be read/write. When a volume is involved in a Remote Copy with a secondary array, the operation fails. You can take a clone snapshot, however you cannot restore it.
Hitachi storage array	COW snapshots; Hitachi Thin Image (HTI) volumes P-VOL and S-VOL
Pure Storage FlashArray	Clone snapshots of volumes
NetApp storage arrays	COW snapshots of LUNs (SAN deployment) or NetApp NFS shares (NAS deployment)
InfiniBox storage arrays	COW snapshots of volumes and file systems that are part of storage pools

Before you proceed, keep in mind the following:

Regardless of the asset type you work with, the steps for creating a snapshot are the same. Depending on the asset, some parameters you enter may be slightly different. They are explained in the procedure.
CloudPoint does not support running multiple operations on the same asset simultaneously. You can perform only one operation at any given time. If multiple operations are submitted for the same asset, then only the first operation is triggered and the remaining operations will fail.
Ensure that you do not select internal-only disk objects for snapshot creation.
While installing and configuring agents and plug-ins on the protected hosts, CloudPoint creates internal volume objects that are required for performing CloudPoint operations. The CloudPoint UI incorrectly displays these internal-only volumes as disk assets and allows you to select these objects for snapshot and restore operations.
The objects appear as disk assets and are typically named as follows:
Disk /dev/<diskmount> on <hostname>.internal

To create a snapshot manually

Navigate to your list of assets.
On the CloudPoint dashboard, in the Environment card, select the asset type you want to work with, and click Manage. This example creates an application snapshot.
On the Asset Management page, select the application for which you want to create a snapshot.
On the asset's Details page, click Create Snapshot

On the Create Snapshot page, complete the following fields.

Field	Description
Snapshot name	A 2- to 32-character string. Cloud vendors have additional restrictions on the snapshot name. In Amazon Web Services, an RDS snapshot or Aurora cluster snapshot name has the following restrictions: The name cannot be null, empty, or blank. The first character must be a letter. The name cannot end with a hyphen or contain two consecutive hyphens. In Google Cloud, an application snapshot name has the following restrictions: The name can only contain lower case letters, numbers, and hyphens. You cannot use an underscore. The name should begin and end with a letter.
Description	This field is optional. You can create a summary to remind you of the snapshot content.
Storage level	This option only displayed for application snapshots. host takes a snapshot of all the disks that are associated with the instance. You cannot restore an application snapshot that has the host protection level. disk takes a snapshot of the disks the application uses.
Applicaiton Consistent	Click this option to enable an application-consistent snapshot. In an application consistent snapshot, CloudPoint notifies the application that it is about to take a snapshot. The application completes its transactions and writes data to memory. It is then briefly frozen and CloudPoint takes the snapshot. The application resumes activity after the snapshot is taken. The default is to create a crash-consistent snapshot. This snapshot type does not capture data in memory or pending operations. An application-consistent snapshot is recommended for database applications. A crash-consistent snapshot is acceptable for other types of assets Note: CloudPoint does not support application-consistent snapshots on ext2 file systems.

The following example creates a disk level snapshot with application consistency.

Click Save.
CloudPoint displays a message that the snapshot is created.

About resource limits for Amazon RDS

By default, AWS allows up to a 100 RDS manual snapshots per region. You may get an error if you try to take more than a 100 snapshots.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_Limits.html#RDS_Limits.Limits

You can work around this issue using any of the following options:

Contact AWS support and request them for an increase in the number of snapshots allowed. Once they do that, you will not get an error until you reach the new limit.
Reduce the retention in your policies so as to keep the snapshots count within the maximum limit.