HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform administrator guide (5697-0204, January 2010)

7. In the DOS command prompt window on the host server, type vshadow.exe -p m: and press
Enter.
This command creates a persistent shadow copy on drive m:. The drive label is the letter that
you gave to the new drive in step 6.
The shadow copy is a read-only point-in-time replica of the original volume contents. A persistent
shadow copy remains in the system until you, or the backup application, initiates an explicit
command to delete the shadow copy. Non-persistent shadow copies are automatically deleted
when the Vshadow creation/import process exits, unless you set either of the Break flags [-b
or -bw] on the shadow set before exit. You can instruct VSS to create a synchronous shadow
copy on several drives by adding the target drive letters to the command. For example,
vshadow.exe -p m n o:
After VSS prepares the volume for snapshot on the host, VSS creates a PiT and a snapshot for
that virtual disk on the VSM. This command creates the snapshot with read/write permissions to
the same server. Although the server sees the snapshot, the snapshot is not mounted automatically
on the server.
To generate a shadow copy in which the snapshot is not presented to any host, type
vshadow.exe -t=<file.xml> m: and press Enter.
You can see the results of running the VShadow utility in the DOS command prompt window.
VSS assigns a shadow copy set number to the snapshot that VSS creates. You can use the shadow
copy set number for correlating the VSS objects on the host server with the corresponding PiT
and views that were created on the VSM. The shadow copy set number appears in these locations:
• The messages on the command prompt windows
• The names of the PiT and the view that are created on the VSM
Figure 27 shows an example of an output messages on the command prompt window. Note the
SNAPSHOT ID number and the shadow copy set number.
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