Configuring NetApp SnapManager for Hyper-V (Part 1) – Creating the Snapinfo LUN

Simple as this sounds I found that the process is not as simple and as well documented as it could be, especially with regards to creating the clustered SnapInfo LUN and folders.  Consequently I decided to document it with (a first for this blog) screenshots.

I am going to assume that you have already hooked up your hosts to your NetApp system, and that you’ve installed SnapDrive and SnapManager for Hyper-V.

The steps, in a nutshell, are:

1. Create the Snapinfo LUN
2. Make the Snapinfo LUN a highly available clustered resource
3. Configure SnapManager for Hyper-V
   

Creating the SnapInfo LUN

1. Create a volume to host your Hyper-V SnapInfo LUN
2. Open up Snapdrive on of your Hyper-V cluster nodes, go to the Disks node, and click Create Disk.  This launches the Create Disk Wizard.
3. Click Next.  Now highlight the volume you created in step 1, enter a LUN name and description:
4. Click Next.  Very Important – select Shared (Microsoft Cluster Services Only)
5. Click Next. The following list should list the active nodes in your Failover Cluster.
6. Click Next. Select the appropriate options and size for your environment***
7. Click Next. Select the initiators to be mapped to the LUN
8. Click Next.  Select whether you want to manually select the igroups (collection of initiators) or whether you want the filer to do it automatically.
9. Click Next. Choose the option to create a new Cluster Group to host the LUN
10. Click Next and click Finish to exit the wizard.

To recap, the above will:

• Create a LUN on the volume of your choosing
• Format the LUN with the NTFS filesystem
• Add the disk to your Failover Cluster as part of a Cluster group
• Assign a driveletter to the disk.

***SnapInfo LUN Size Provisioning:  The NetApp filer will store about 50KB metadata per VM per snapshot.  Due to the way Hyper-V snapshots work it will store two snaps per snapshot, therefore if we backup 20 VM’s once per day our sizing will be as follows:  20 * 50KB = 1MB * 2 = 2MB per day.  NetApp allows us to store 255 snapshots per volume so we should cater for 510 MB total.  I give it 10GB just because I can.  And because thin provisioning works.