Image level backup mounting luns - online or offline

[johndavey]

I am starting to do image level backups of my VM's. I am at 2010 R3 and VMware 4.1. I have the luns presented to the backup server. I did the automount disable and automount scrub. The drives sow in disk manager online with no formatting. Should these drives be online or offline? Thanks, John

[Backup_Exec1]

Hi Please check the document below http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH155831 Thanks

[johndavey]

Thanks for the reply. the problem is my disks come up as basic online. I put them offline. NoAutoMount is set to 1 in the registry. I am able to do a backup this way but fear the data could beconme corrupt at some point.

[teiva-boy]

You shouldn't have to touch the online/offline function.

And yes you can corrupt the VMFS volumes if you mess with them.  There is nothing in Windows you can do to prevent a fat finger trying to claim the drives for additional space.  All you can do is have good documentation and proper change controls.

Perhaps use sysinternals BGInfo to write something on the screen?  

[Colin_Weaver]

My test servers LUN's show as "Online, Healthy (Unknown Partition)" and I have not changed these settings

[CraigV]

Hi John,

A suggestion I made to someone a couple of weeks ago was to put a logon message onto the server clearly stating that NO drives are to be initialised. Going hand-in-hand with this was a suggestion to lock the server down seriously...don't allow just anybody to log on.

Thanks!

[johndavey]

thanks for the replies. Yes Craig  I believe you replied to me about writing to the screen a few weeks ago which was a great idea we are implementing. The powers that be here just see this as a risk and want me to do everything I can to make sure nothing happens. So from Colins respons I believe it is ok to put these drives back online and just make sure they are not initialized/formatted. thanks all...John