DPM:This weekend I ran my first full production backup using SC DPM and hardware VSS writers from 3PAR and Lefthand. I am glad to say that DPM works flawlessly with their hardware VSS writers. I see snapshots in the SAN being created and deleted. I have a 4 node HV 2012 R2 cluster here.
One thing though:
The backups snapshots are sent to the backup server over TCP/IP network. I want the snaps to be mounted to the backup server automatically and copied over FC or iSCSI.
HP promises this and calls it "Transportable VSS snapshots" That is not happening. I think this cannot happen using DPM, it is do-able via RMH.
RMH:HP tech support called me late friday; they say that RMH should not be this slow. The tech was saying he has never seen it this slow....but then again, he said he has not seen RMH in a HV cluster setup and accessing that many VMs (we don't have too many VMs...just around 80 VMs).
He is supposed to call me back after talking to his peers.
slink wrote:
I concur. I tried HVRM as an alternative to using MSDPM when the hardware/software VSS problems were failing the backups or worse taking the cluster offline. It was unusably slow. HP shouldn't even be offering it. They are just trying to tick a box but nobody can be using it regularly because it just doesn't work well enough.
Disabling ODX resolved software VSS backup issues in DPM so now that the ODX problem has been fixed for Windows (3.1.3 and a couple of patch releases before that contained the fix too) I suspect DPM backups leveraging 3PAR virtual copies might be viable again so if you already have the System Centre Datacentre licensing it might be worth a look. Pretty good product IMO when it works.
PS: try hardware VSS instead of software VSS....MUCH faster!