HP Application Recovery Manager software A.06.10 Administrator's guide (March 2008)

backup-related problem and possible workarounds, see
“Backup problems” on page 57.
Snapshot types
Application Recovery Manager supports the following snapshot types:
• Snapshots with pre-allocation of disk space (standard snapshots).
• Snapshots without pre-allocation of disk space (vsnaps or Virtually Capacity-Free
Snapshots).
• A full copy of the source volume (original virtual disk), independent of the original
virtual disk (snapclones).
You can select the snapshot type in the GUI when creating a backup specification.
For more information on snapshot types, see the HP Application Recovery Manager
software concepts guide.
Replica creation and reuse
On UNIX, SMI-S Agent identifies physical volumes, the volume group, and all logical
volumes residing on it. This enables replication of the entire volume group on the
array. On Windows, SMI-S Agent identifies partitions on a physical volume and
entire disk is replicated. As a best practice, backup objects, such as filesystems or
raw devices, from all logical volumes in a volume group and all partitions on physical
volumes should be included in the backup. This helps ensure proper handling of
filesystems and mount points during backup and restore.
For each backup, a new replica is created and added to the replica set.
If the specified Number of replicas rotated is reached, the oldest replica in the set is
deleted first before a new replica is created. In case of snapclones, if the volumes
of the oldest replica have the same size, RAID level, and disk group location as is
required in the current session, specific volumes may be reused for the creation of
the new replica (a container is created out of the old volumes).
The replica can be used for instant recovery only if the Track the replica for instant
recovery option is selected. If not selected, the replica may only be used for backup
to tape with third–party backup software or other administrative tasks.
Note that the number of replicas rotated has a significant impact on the amount of
the required storage space. This storage requirement must be taken into consideration
when planning backup environments.
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