Business Copy and Dynamic Disks

[Luis_135]

I have an EVA4000 with BC EVA v3.2 1TB LTU. My SAN hosts are all Windows (2000 and 2003).I plan to use RSM to snapshot every virtual disk in EVA (one at a time) and present them to a Backup Server (Veritas) in order to backup to tapes in an MSL6030 library.

I have tried to automatize the process of: create snapshot, present snapshot, (backup), unpresent snapshot and delete snapshot.

I have used one of the templates that come with RSM to replicate and mount a host volume.

My problem is: Everything seems to work fine, as long as i work with basic disks. If i work with dynamic disks, the scripts don't work. After the VDisk is presented, Windows treats it as "Foreign", and if i don't manually "Import" the disk, the script fails. Also, when removing the disk, if it's dynamic, the disk remains as "Missing", it does not disappear from the windows hosts, and causes me problems when trying to present the next snapshot.

As i said, none of this happens when working with basic disks.

The question is: Do i have to work with basic disks?
Is there any other workaround to this problem?
Are dynamic disks supported by BC EVA v3.2?

Thanks

[MARamius · Accepted solution]

Hello Luis,

- the older BC2.3 did NOT support dynamic disks
- BC3.x (RSM) seems to be supporting them, however it still don't work as one would expect.
- From my experience with different hardware/software/backup-systems/...:
Try to avoid Dynamic Disks until absolutely neccessary, because they give you a lot of headaches!
- especially W2K3 works well with basic disks (online expansion with diskpart.exe is our daily business)
- I have to use 1 dyn-disk in our environment (software RAID1 between EVA-VDisk and local SmartArray-Volume) to be protected against SAN-problems and still have SAN-capabilities like Snaps/Clones/..., however I was unable to use BC/RSM to mount a snap to a backupserver...

hope this helps a bit, even if you have to re-create your environment with basic disks

[Larry De Clay]

Hi,
I suffered the same issue with W2k3 and dynamic disks.
Somebody have some clue about that ?

Regards,
Larry

[Luis_135]

Larry,

i would recommend to go with basic disks, your life will be better, believe me!

You have the "diskpart" command to expand basic disks if you need it, not as versatile as a dinamic disk, but it has been enough for me.

Good luck!