Storage snapshots on 3Par StoreServ

[GarethWilson]

We have a new 3par 7400 which is hosting a VVol For our vm's running on our 6.0 U1a servers, i have imported the 3Par storage system into B&R and it shows up under the "Storage Intrastructre" section but i cannot see the VVOL there ? Should i be seeing it there ? Also we have a test backup job running against these test vms and in the properties of the backup job we have told it to "use storage snapshots" and NOT to fail back to standard snapshots, when the backup job runs i cannot see any activity in the 3Par logs to say snapshots are being created and i can see the .00001 files in the folder of the vm while its backing up. Where do i need to look to confirm that it is using the hardware level snapshots ? Also should i see the VVol under the storage infrastructure section

Many thanks in advance

[foggy]

Actually storage snapshots are not even involved here. You should see the vVol under Backup Infrastructure as an ordinary ESXi datastore. In case of vVol, each VM disk (VMDK) is a separate LUN on your storage (virtual volume in case of 3PAR). When backup job calls VMware to create VM snapshot, it triggers that LUN snapshot through VASA provider.

[emachabert]

Yes, vvol is natively offloading the snapshot process to the storage array. Then you get the advantage of COW snapshots for backups

[GarethWilson]

Thanks for the replies, im not sure how we get the veeam server to see the virtual volume though as it doesn't exist on the 3Par as such as its controlled by the 3par vasa and VMware seems to control who can see the virtual volume so there is no way to "present" it to the veeam server as such ?

Many thanks again

[foggy]

It exists, however not shown in 3PAR console. You can use the showvvolvm command to view those volumes, though.

What is the purpose of presenting them to backup server?

[dellock6]

Gareth, also remember that in VADP libraries in vSphere 6.0, directSAN mode is not supported for VVOLs, the only supported methods are hotadd and network mode, thus another reason there's no direct connection between the proxy and the storage, and the snapshot/volume is presented via the hypervisor.

[DaveWatkins]

I've been investigating VVOL's recently and everything I've read from the VMWare side of the fence indicates that if you're using VVOL's then all snapshots become SAN Snapshots, IE VMWare doesn't use it's native snapshots anymore and instead offloads it all down to the SAN.

Now, VVOL's are supported in all versions of Veeam but SAN snapshots are only supported in Ent Plus, so how does that resolve itself? Does that mean if my VM's are all running from VVOL containers then even with Veeam Std I effectively get SAN Snapshot capability if I have a Transport server connected directly to the SAN?

Thanks

[foggy]

It's actually a bit different story, Veeam B&R storage snapshots functionality is not involved here (see my first reply in this thread).