Best practices to mount an Equallogic snapshot to a second server

Hi

this is my first post so a big "hello!" to the whole community.

My scenario is:

2 x Dell PE-R610 with embedded ESXi 5.0 hypervisor

2 x PowerConnect 6224

1 x Equallogic PS4100XV (8 x 600GB SAS) with a single Raid-5 storage pool

Setup is working good, we have several vm running fine (file server, dc, mail, ecc,)

Now we need to create two new DB Server VM with Oracle, (Win2008 R2, C: sys, D: archive log, E: db files), schedule snapshot of the database disk at daily basis and mount the snapshot to a second and different VM with Oracle installed for data mining, business intelligence, reporting, ecc.

What are the best practices to create this environment and to automate the task?

I've tried to test this solution:

vm db01 - C: virtual disk, d: virtual disk, e: RDM lun

vm db02 - C: virtual disk, d: virtual disk, no e: disk

I can create a snapshot of the RDM lun, manually rescan hba's inside vcenter to recognize the new snapshot, and add the snapshot as rdm to db02.

Although this test is working good i'm not sure it's the best/correct method, and it's not so easy to automate all processes, particularly the hba rescan inside vcenter.

Maybe it's better to use directly the ms iscsi initator to connect the rdm lun inside db01, skipping the vmware layer? In that case could i use ASM to generate/mount snapshots inside the two vm's?

I have a lot of doubts, so many thanks in advance for your advices

Gianfranco