Is it possible to present a volume read-only to one host but read-write to other hosts?

Let me investigate something and get back to you on this shortly

We use IBM Spectrum Protect. It is software you install on a Linux or Windows server yourself, so not an appliance. We talked to some of our colleagues in our medical school and they had an issue where when someone reinstalled a backup server they wiped all of the datastore volumes.

I think its a limitation on bandwidth going in to/out of the firewall

If you are talking NetBackup appliances, we just connect/map them normally (r/w) to the NetBackup appliances and they work without any observable side effects. The appliances only read - perhaps they even mount them read-only. Not sure. We have had them configured this way for several years.

So this is possible, somewhat. We can make an entire volume read only, meaning every host treats the volume as read only. So maybe you can copy the VMFS and backup from that? But to tom.borcher's point i think that is a very common configuration.

Here is the procedure to make a volume read only, via PowerShell. It is a feature only available from REST

```$fa = New-PfaArray -EndPoint http://flasharray-x50-1.purecloud.com|flasharray-x50-1.purecloud.com -Credentials (Get-Credential) -IgnoreCertificateError $ApiToken =@{"api-token"=$fa.ApiToken} $AuthResponse = Invoke-webrequest -Method Post -Uri "https://$($fa.Endpoint)/api/2.2/login" -Headers $ApiToken -SkipCertificateCheck $AuthHeader = @{"x-auth-token" = ($AuthResponse.Headers."x-auth-token")[0]} Invoke-webrequest -Method PATCH -Uri "https://$($fa.Endpoint)/api/2.2/volumes?names=codyROvol" -Headers $AuthHeader -SkipCertificateCheck -Body "{`"requested_promotion_state`":`"demoted`"}" Invoke-webrequest -Method GET -Uri "https://$($fa.Endpoint)/api/2.2/volumes?names=codyROvol" -Headers $AuthHeader -SkipCertificateCheck```

replace the FA address and volume name of course

The backup software kicks off a snapshot in vCenter, then mounts the VMFS and copies the VM, and then deletes the snapshot. I don't think I have a way to orchestrate the copying the VMFS volume to a read only copy.

I can present the volume read-write, but then the issue is someone could format the disk unintentionally