RM 5: Multiple Snaps of Clone

Hi Aran.
Hope all is well. Welcome to the forums

Ok, what you are encountering with the Hidden and RO flags is by design.

After every replication (ie in your case clone sync), we set the Hidden and ReadOnly flags on the target volume (in your case a Clone).

We do this for protection of the gold copy, so a user does not inadvertiently modify the data from a host which typically is masked to the Target volume. On mount, we unset the flags after we find the volume on a rescan. RM 5.0 does the same. It is a requirement of the product to do so.

While you are at RM/SE, it is possible to script what you need.
Diskpart can be scripted with the parameter /S.
You would need to first find your disk numbers after the snap activiation and rescan ;
echo list volume > samplediskpart.txt
diskpart /s samplediskpart.txt | find "volume label I am looking for" (use delims to pull out the number)

and then operate on those.
Check http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415 for further info into diskpart scripting.


Yes you can do what you need to do in RM 5.0. I took some time there to test it in my lab.

1. Create the Clone Job

Then for each of the 3 mount hosts do the following;

2. Create a Snap Copy Job with the source being the Clone Job.
Name the Job with the specific mount host name in it for easy recognition.
3. Set a retention of 1 Snap
4. Make sure to untick "Start when source job completes"
5. Set your Mount host to say MountHost1 or 2 or 3 with your required mount options

Important to remember;
1. Never attempt to run the 3 Snap jobs at the same time - this will not work, snap creation off the Clone lun is sequential. so, you will need to serialize your jobs in a controlled fashion, either by script or by time.

2. Always allow a gap between the snap jobs running. At least 2 minutes.


Hope it helps
James.

James,
Thank you for the reply. That is good news, the ability in RM5 to create Snap of Clone jobs. The inability to do this in RMSE has been one of its major shortcomings for me.

Yes, I have to use diskpart to clear the attributes and then assign drive letters to the snap volumes. My script runs locally on each mount host and the removing of attributes and assigning drive letters is the only part that is keeping this script from being completely automated. I use text files and the diskpart /s option to run the diskpart options within the script, but it requires the script to be paused so that I can edit the volume number in the text files before the script can continue.

My goal is to automate the whole process. So with the ability of RM5 to schedule Snap of Clone jobs, is it possible to automate that process so that the snaps are mounted on the mount host at specific drive letters that are different from the original drive letters on the source host? Part of my script mounts the sql database once the snapshot refresh is complete, and the sql data files need to be on the same drive letters on the mount host every time.

Thanks for your help James,
Aran

Thanks for the response Stefan. I am looking forward to deploying RM5 in my environment.

Aran