Best Practices for the Dell Compellent Storage Array

Review the following best practices before using Dell Compellent.

General

• Use Boot from SAN volumes for supported server operating systems. However, it is recommended to avoid saving application data (such as Exchange or SQL Server data) on Boot from SAN volumes.

• IntelliSnap backups should be performed on data volumes that are mapped to the server.

• Use Storage Center replication for supported server operating systems.

• Use the revert operation on the most recent snapshot. Selecting an older snapshot might delete the most recent ones from the Storage Center software.

Backing Up VMware ESXi 5.0 Environments

Create user-defined subclients to optimize backup operations against virtual machine datastores or datastore clusters. The following guidelines can help increase the efficiency of backups:

• Use separate datastores or datastore clusters for large, critical, and high transaction virtual machines, with a small number of virtual machines for each datastore.

• Create separate subclients for different classes of virtual machines, where the VMs in each class have the same protection requirements and backup methods. In particular, create separate subclients for:

  • Regular streaming backups

  • IntelliSnap backups with backup copy

• For each user-defined subclient, include virtual machines that reside on the same datastore or datastore cluster as described in Adding Subclient Content. You can define automatic discovery rules to target virtual machines on specific datastores, hosts, or other entities, and filters to exclude virtual machines based on similar criteria.

• Avoid having multiple subclients that address the same datastore, so that backups for different subclients do not have to take multiple hardware snapshots of the same datastore during IntelliSnap backups.

• Use the same storage policy for virtual machines in the same datastore to minimize the number of snapshots.

• Minimize the number of LUNs that connect to the ESX proxy server to increase the efficiency of mounting snapshots.

The virtual machines in each subclient are processed in a single backup job. When different subclients address different datastores, backup jobs can run in parallel for better performance when backing up many virtual machines.

This approach provides greater scalability, increases the efficiency of backups, reduces the impact on production systems, and simplifies management.

Backing Up SQL Servers

To perform a IntelliSnap backup of SQL virtual instances running ESX(i), it is recommended that:

• Dell Compellent volumes are present in the virtual machine as physical Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) from the ESX(i) host.

Backing Up Exchange Servers

To perform a IntelliSnap backup of Exchange virtual instances running ESX(i), it is recommended that:

• Dell Compellent volumes are present in the virtual machine as physical Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) from the ESX(i) host.

Backing Up SQL Databases Using Dell Compellent Snap Engine

To perform a IntelliSnap backup of SQL virtual instances running ESX(i), it is recommended that:

• Dell Compellent volumes are present in the virtual machine as physical Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) from the ESX(i) host.