Using Snapclone for backing up Windows 2003?

[Chris Rosan]

Hello all,

I've got an EVA8000 2C4D with P Class blades attached. I use an DL360 with a SCSI tape drive to backup the SAN over ethernet to each servers (Backup Exec 10/11) as there isn't a lot of information we need to backup.

I've got a couple of LUN's that are presented to hosts in DMZ. I don't really want to allow the backup through the firewall, or have to buy agents for all the servers in the DMZ.

I'm using snapclone to backup my linux environment on the EVA. I snap the volumes and present them to another server, then run the backup over ethernet to this server (required for VERY VERY short backup window). Works like a TREAT (fully automated runs without intervention at 3am).

I'm testing doing this with windows as well, but when i've snapcloned the volume & i present it to another server, it can't read the volume. The only different is one server is W2K3 R2 Web edition, the other is W2k3 R2 Storage server (can't see this being an issue though).

The drive i'm trying to snapclone is NOT the system drive (C drive).

Does anyone have any ideas?

I read an article recently on dynamic disks that said you should be careful when using dynamic disks especially on a SAN as the information for ALL dynamic disks are stored in the one database, and if you lose one dynamic disk it can affect all. I mention this because the only thing it will let me do in disk manager with the snapcloned disk is convert it to dynamic. I don't really want to do this.