vSphere Storage Appliance

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  • 1.  MS SQL Server VMs on NetApp NFS

    Posted May 03, 2012 03:19 PM

    We are using a 3-tier approach for grouping our VMs as far as which Datastores the VMs files reside in (SRM protects only 2 of the datastores).  We use NFS on NetApp Filers for our datastores.  Everything is working well, until we decided to use NetApp SnapManager for SQL (SMSQL) to backup the SQL databases inside the VMs.  Our DBA ideally would like to do an hourly SMSQL backups of all our SQL Server VMs with a retention of 7 to 8 days.  The SQL Server VMs use VMDKs for its storage (no iSCSI inside guest).  Running on NetApp, and everything stored on one of the 3 datastores, we hit the 255 NetApp snapshot limit.  As such, we are debating of putting each of the SQL Server VMs on its own datastore.  So with 30 SQL Server VMs, we will have in essence 30 new datastores connected per host.

    Has anyone done this or something similar?  Do you have another solution that you can share?  We've read most of the NetApp/VMware docs, but it's still unclear on the best approach.

    Thanks.



  • 2.  RE: MS SQL Server VMs on NetApp NFS

    Posted Aug 20, 2012 03:41 PM

    can you share your setup as how you have configured the aggregate/volumes for SQL server user database, logs, snapinfo. I am looking to do this setup for our sql environment but could not find a definitive or recommended setup anywhere.