Shadow Copies

gymmbo · Thu May 05, 2011 5:57 pm

This may be a MS question but I need to start somewhere.

I have my StarWind HA running along now and as I am working on other parts of my infrastructure to create a HA environment I stumbled on an area of question.

I have 4 VMs running file share services. I have several targets (LUNs) advertised to these servers which will be used to host various department data. Under my current setup, since the department data is on a disk I am able to use shadow copies. As I am trying to architect this thing out, I am using shadow copy on the SAN for the .img file but any restore of a single document will be a small undertaking. What would be a best practice for something like this? I have included an image of what I am looking at.

Thanks,

Thu May 05, 2011 8:38 pm

You can configue both server-side snapshots (done for the whole LUN on StarWind side by StarWind) and client-side snapshots (done by Microsoft on initiator side). Both should work fine. I'd suggest client-side snapshots however as they don't involve any inter-process communications and avoid compatibility issues. Just make sure you have enough of disk space as VSS requires AFAIK 20% free space on the volume to work properly.

P.S. Upcoming version of StarWind will have VSS/VDS compatible HA and VSS hardware provider so it would require even less overhead. FYI.

gymmbo · Thu May 05, 2011 9:22 pm

Thanks for the quick reply Anton.

I was thinking this through and as I moved around between the nodes in the cluster it dawned on me to just create a new LUN, attach to each node in the cluster (as with the shares I already connected). I then went to the properties of each drive in Disk Management and pointed the settings for Shadow Copies to the new drive. Will be testing it out simulating failures but I think I got it. Looking forward to the updated versions.

Thanks again!

Thu May 05, 2011 10:38 pm

Should work fine. You don't need any updated versions to do what you want right now however.

gymmbo wrote:Thanks for the quick reply Anton.

I was thinking this through and as I moved around between the nodes in the cluster it dawned on me to just create a new LUN, attach to each node in the cluster (as with the shares I already connected). I then went to the properties of each drive in Disk Management and pointed the settings for Shadow Copies to the new drive. Will be testing it out simulating failures but I think I got it. Looking forward to the updated versions.

Thanks again!