Any way of hooking into SAN snapshot capability?

[danswartz]

I am running an NFS datastore using ZFS. ZFS allows easy and fast snapshot capabilities, including the ability to mount a snapshot in the filesystem hierarchy, and extract files, etc... Looking a the veeam B&R docs, the SAN snapshot functionality seems to be restricted to HP LeftHand and EMC? Is there any way to use this with other SAN systems? I'd be fine with using iSCSI instead of NFS if I could do so - ZFS snapshots are much faster than ESXi snapshots (almost instantaneous, and no performance penalty for having dozens or even hundreds of them present.) Even if I had to 'roll my own' scripts to act as middleware between Veeam B&R and ZFS, I'd not complain. Any thoughts appreciated, thanks!

[Gostev]

Hi Dan - no way of hooking, unfortunately. But I am curious, how do you manage snapshots on ZFS. Is there an API available? Thanks.

[danswartz]

It's all done through the shell. For example:

zfs snapshot tank/foo/bar@snapname
zfs clone tank/foo/bar@snapname tank/foo/bar1

and the snapshot taken in step one is now mounted at /tank/foo/bar1.

[Gostev]

Got it, thanks.

[Itamar]

I see IBM, HP, Dell, etc storage options available.

I don't think it would be too hard to work out adding FreeNAS in the same way so that it could automate connectivity to iSCSI, NFS, or SMB access to a FreeNAS dataset.

[Gostev]

Are you talking about primary storage (where production VMs reside), or backup repository?