Boot from San & Snapshots

[jaksen112]

have found articles that state snapshots of boot volumes can only be taken when the server is shut down. this is undesirebale for anyone wanting point in time recovery options of a boot lun throughout the day.

has anyone found a way to work around this? I'm thinking perhaps mirror the boot volume and snap it from the secondary lun but havent tried it out yet ....

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[comtec17]

You should look at Synchronous Replication such as Mirrorview/S

 

[jaksen112]

we're using mirrorview/A and that works fine as far as copying luns (system even) to a dr site, however locally snapview doesnt support boot lun snapshots which is what I was trying to accomplish.

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[MikeDeardurff]

what flare are you running?

We take snapshots of our boot from SAN servers and have not had trouble yet.

 

[comtec17]

The problem you will run into is that the data is online hot and data in memory has not been commited to the host or disk, very risky. I would look at a product like Veritas Bare Metal or Bakbone Netvaults Bare Metal products.

 

[jaksen112]

we're running flare code 2.16, while I have been able to take snapshots of system boot luns, I have not been able to use them as a successful backup. the snapshot can be mounted to another host and if there were files deleted they can be recovered, however the snapshot is not bootable even if backed up to tape. so it seems the best way I've found to back these luns up would be to use cloning/mirroring (which cant be used concurrently)

will eventually setup the scripts to break mirrors and clone these luns overnight.

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