best practive wih multiple san backup

[frankive]

Hi.
we are just investing in our second san in our datacenter. It is a Hp Storevirtal 4330. We have a Lefthand P4300 from the beginning so it is the same familit and can also use the same hardware vss provider.

When i create backup jobs, should i create one job for each of the virtual machines on those particular san or doesnt it matter? I see some deployments where the hyper-v guys also combinde f.ex the c drive in a VM on one san and the d drive on another san. Doesnt sound like a best practice ?

[emachabert]

There are no "best practices" regarding data placement over multiple arrays, it depends on your applications needs and many other parameters. The only thing I can see here is that spreading hard drives of a single VM across multiple arrays create strong dependancy between those arrays.
By the Way, dealing with p4300 and sv4330 is a bit different since (depending on many things such as network configuration and array configuration) you could clusterize those two arrays, so data would be stripped over the two nodes, appearing as a single storage array. That is the purpose of storevirtual arrays.

FYI: you use the word SAN, which refer to a network type for speaking about a storage array residing in that network. Don't worry, many people make that mistake.

Eric.

[Vitaliy S.]

Frank, are you using Hyper-V in your environment? Hardware VSS does make sense only when you're creating VSS snapshot on the volume that hosts Hyper-V VMs.

[frankive]

emachabert: not sure what I misunderstood about the San part? Both the storevirtul 4330 and lefthand p4300 is considered as SAN?

Vitaliy: Yes, it is a Hyper-v environment. I use hardware vss for my Lefthand P4300 now, it works great. The Storevirtual 4330 should also use the same hardware vss provider during the snapshot.

I just wonder if I should keep in mind where the VMs are residing on the different SAN when creating the backup jobs or if I just should forget the "san-level" during designing Veeam backup?

[Vitaliy S.]

Oh ok, in this case it doesn't matter how you group your VMs in the backup job. I also assume you can even use the same off-host proxy server connected to both storages to backup your VMs, so you should be fine.

[emachabert]

I was just pointing the misuse of the word SAN for talking about a storage array
SAN is the network on wich you connect storage arrays, a storage array is not a SAN, it is part of a SAN.

But don't stick on my reply, it´s Sunday

[frankive]

ah, off course Great tip

[dellock6]

Just a quick tip for StoreVirtual design: even if it's possible to mix different models in the same cluster, the differences in performances between the two are going to create fluctuations in I/O when a LUN moves from one node to the other. It doesn't mean it cannot be done, only be careful about this... I'm not even sure HP "officially" supports storevirtual clusters with different nodes, probably they recommend to create two different clusters in the same management group.

Luca.

[emachabert]

Luca,

AFAIK it is supported provided you update the software of the older array to meet compability requirements, and the whole system will slow down to the speed of the slower array.
If configurations are too different, I wouldn't do that

[frankive]

I think I will go for 2 separate clusters in the same management group so they caan share the same failover manager.
I will probably have to upgrade to the same versions of the OS to have the same features.