Questions[filer](server)

Our NetApp filer shows huge amounts of lag for snapvault operations. What could be possible causes of such large snapshot lag?

Snapvault is ON.
Source                Destination                     State          Lag        Status
home:/vol/home/       vault1:/vol/home_backup/        Source         1602:06:04  Idle
home:/vol/h_root/-    vault1:/vol/home_backup/h_root  Source         1578:07:40  Idle

Listing of the .snapshot directory reveals an mtime of Dec 2, even on directories where the live filesystem has had modified files since that date.

drwx--x--x  13 user  staff       8192 Dec  2 17:35 Feb-01

A snapvault status -l reveals the following information:

Snapvault is ON.

Source:                 home:/vol/home/
Destination:            vault1:/vol/home_backup/
Status:                 Idle
Progress:               -
State:                  Source
Lag:                    1602:15:24
Mirror Timestamp:       Fri Dec  2 00:01:56 PST 2011
Base Snapshot:          sv.7
Current Transfer Type:  -
Current Transfer Error: could not read from socket
Contents:               -
Last Transfer Type:     -
Last Transfer Size:     28618316 KB
Last Transfer Duration: 04:02:46
Last Transfer From:     -

Source:                 home:/vol/h_root/-
Destination:            vault1:/vol/home_backup/h_root
Status:                 Idle
Progress:               -
State:                  Source
Lag:                    1578:17:00
Mirror Timestamp:       Sat Dec  3 00:00:20 PST 2011
Base Snapshot:          sv.7
Current Transfer Type:  -
Current Transfer Error: could not read from socket
Contents:               -
Last Transfer Type:     -
Last Transfer Size:     1488 KB
Last Transfer Duration: 00:00:04
Last Transfer From:     -

On the destination end, we have this output for snapvault status:

Source                               Destination                                State          Lag        Status
home:/vol/home/                      vault1:/vol/home_backup/                   Snapvaulted    1602:24:40  Quiescing
home:/vol/h_root/-                   vault1:/vol/home_backup/h_root             Snapvaulted    1578:26:16  Quiescing

Both source and destination filers are running NetApp Release 8.0.2.

This may sound dumb but I am asking because I think there is an easy solution to this before I scratch my head too much.

We have a SAN with a filer on top that provides NFS share for other servers.

ServerA and ServerB have this share NFS mounted with no_root_squash. ServerA has userA on it which owns a folderA on NFS NAS. ServerB has UserB on it which needs write access to folderA.

is the solution to create a NFSUsers group on all servers and chgrp the folder to that or is there any other way?

We use a NetApp FAS 6-series filer with an application that spans multiple volumes. For backup purposes I would like to create a consistent snapshot that spans these volumes at the same point in time (or at least with an extremely low delta); additionally, we'd like to to use SnapMirror to replace the production environment to test volumes.

The problem is in creating a consistent snapshot/SnapMirror, since these commands are not transactional and do not take multiple parameters. I tried scripting consecutive "snap create" or "snapmirror resync" commands via SSH, but there's always a 0.5-2 second difference between each snapshot. It's currently "good enough", but I'm seriously concerned about the consistency impact with increased load (we're currently in pre-production).

Has anyone managed to create a consistent snapshot that spans several volumes? How did you pull it off?