Anyone using 3PAR Recovery Manager for Hyper-V?

[rajdude]

Hello everyone,
I am a long time lurker but first time posting here....

In my quest to speed up backup and recovery I looked at 3PAR Recovery Manager for Hyper-V (RMH). So far I have installed it with the help of 3PAR tech support. We have it installed on a physical server and configured it for a 4 node Hyper-V 2012 R2 cluster on a 7400. It sees the VMs and VVs just fine.

I am having major problems with RMH….

1. RMH does not actually make a Virtual Copy.
It says that it did finish successfully, no errors…………but if we go the virtual copes tab, nothing is shown.

2. RMH is extremely slow!
Any action takes tens of minutes. It is almost unusable. It just shows “Task in progress” and we keep waiting for a LONG time.

Anyone here using RMH?

PS: My end goal was to take a snapshot using RMH, mount the snapshot to the backup server and copy to tape. That way the data flow would be all over Fiber Channel network and not over the slower 1 GB TCP/IP network. This seems to be just a pipe dream, though 

[rajdude]

update:
So I did some more troubleshooting and eventually was able to make a Virtual Copy of a VM using RMH. The actual process is fast. The snapshot remains in the SAN...on the copy space allocated to the VV.

The GUI's slowness problem remains....

For example:
After I created the Virtual Copy (VC) in RMH, I clicked on the cluster name on the left side. Then I clicked on the Virtual volumes button on the right side....
It took 9 minutes for the pop-up message to go away which said:

Task in progress: Retrieve Virtual volumes for 'our_cluster_name'

This is way too slow to be usable!

[Schmoog]

I would say that the slowness you're experiencing sounds neither normal nor acceptable, and I would log a tech support call with hp

[rajdude]

I would say that the slowness you're experiencing sounds neither normal nor acceptable, and I would log a tech support call with hp

you are right...and I do have a ticket open with HP.....their response time is as slow as their application! LOL

[hdtvguy]

We have tried RM-V a few times, including the most recent releases and it is a dog. So slow and can not handle the number of datastores/volumes our arrays have. We have worked with HP dev on the issues for over a year with no significant improvement. We have abandoned RM-V in favor of hoe grown scripts that snap the VMs then snap the array volumes, much faster and we just point it at a cluster and it enumerates everything and goes. My next iteration of the script it so then trigger replication.

[rajdude]

ok that makes sense....I guess that is why their tech support has not called me back.......in spite of me calling them a couple of times......because they really do not have a solution for the slowness.

So, the scripts you use, are they using 3PAR CLI commands or one of these which come with RMH/V:
RmhAdmin CLI
RMHyper-V PowerShell

Any chance you could share the scripts?
Although I have Hyper-V here and you have VMware.....still I could get some tips. Thanks!

We have tried RM-V a few times, including the most recent releases and it is a dog. So slow and can not handle the number of datastores/volumes our arrays have. We have worked with HP dev on the issues for over a year with no significant improvement. We have abandoned RM-V in favor of hoe grown scripts that snap the VMs then snap the array volumes, much faster and we just point it at a cluster and it enumerates everything and goes. My next iteration of the script it so then trigger replication.

[hdtvguy]

Just posted a thread in the scripts section with info and the script.

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=830

[rajdude]

Thanks!
I am looking at it now

Just posted a thread in the scripts section with info and the script.

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=830

[slink]

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.

[rajdude]

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.

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!