Today I installed Equallogic Auto Snapshot Manager / VMware Edition V1 for the first time. The first thing I had to do was upgrade the controller firmware to 4.0.2 from 3.x. It took about 20 minutes once I could get telnet to cooperate (use putty not DOS). No problems, quick reboot, then you have to open up a new browser because the old java gui that is loaded in the browser cache is not valid. Then I went through the documentation of ASM/ VE and found that it requires the newest version of Java, so I installed.
The install of ASM / VE was very simple. You put in the IP and credentials for Virtual Center, then the IP and credentials for the Equallogic Group. It installs in about 2 minutes and starts the services and verifies installation. Once up you log in via a web gui and it looks very Equallogic (if you can use that as an adjective?). Pretty much just shows the hierarchy of VirtualCenter. You have options to take Smart Copies and setup schedules for Smart Copies. Smart Copies are snapshots of the running virtual machine, it's memory state (optional), and any attached iSCSI rdm's. (optional). This is very similar to Microsoft DPM as it takes point in time snapshots for rollback.
One thing that I wish would be included would be the ability to put a Smart Copy online and mount the vmdk to recover files (much like vRanger). As it is, this is just a rollback technology. That being said, the size of the snapshots are extremely small and don't grow like VMware initiated snapshots. So in practice, I believe that this feature allows administrators to create snapshots of vm's prior to doing updates, etc. without the fear of snapshot overgrowth leading to LUN crashing. Now if there was a way to add this as an option to the snapshot process inside of VirtualCenter (also Update Manager as well) and it has file recovery options it would make for one killer app.
I plan on adding more information as the testing proceeds and will add screenshots.
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I haven't been able to test ASM/VE myself, but as from what I read, the main drawback is that you're still taking snapshots at LUN level (but OK, now they should be consistent).
I can't think of a scenario where you want to rollback all VM's on one VMFS datastore. Yes, there is: In case of disaster. But then you have to replicate the snapshot off-site.
So I must agree. It's not the full-scaled backup solution. But it might help (and it's for free, so why not?)
Let me know if you're still planning on elaborating on this topic (screenshots,...)
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