newbie - help please on Virtual copies

[yermaw]

hi, I am getting deeper every day in 3par work , and today's ( I mean this minute's) challenge is to take a Virtual copy of a physical copy( for a set of volumes )


scenario
8 luns in a set, have a physical copy of each one, again, in a set.
we need to createvvcxopy -r on the set each night ( this takes a few hours to complete after the initial snapshot )

we then need to take a Virtual copy of the Physical Copy set and present this set to our backup server.
so we run the updatevv -f set:Virt_copy_set

Question: can I take a virtual copy of the physical copy while the physical copy re-synch is in progress, or do I need to wait til it finishes to be able to guarantee a consistent backup can be taken of the LUNS ??

many thanks in advance.

[Cleanur]

You'll need to wait for the resync to complete in order to get a consistent PIT copy.

And no you can't take a virtual copy of the physical copy during the resync, hoping for it to be updated with the copy on write changes made during the resync because the snapshot is a point in time, so any changes to the source made after the snap event will not be recorded in the snap.

To be honest I wouldn't even bother with physical copies they provide pretty much zero benefit vs snapshots in a wide striped array and are only really kept around for legacy purposes. Just take a snapshot and you have zero capacity overhead and no wait time, all the disks are shared anyway even on a physical copy.