Forum Discussion

adarobin's avatar
adarobin
Novice I
3 years ago
Solved

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

 Use case: present VMFS volumes normally to a VMware cluster and read-only to a server running backup software for SAN transport backups.

flasharray
  • adarobin's avatar
    adarobin
    3 years ago
    We talked to IBM and they recommended not using SAN transport mode which seems insane to me. When we use NBD we end up being throttled by the firewall that the ESXi management interfaces are behind.
  • adarobin's avatar
    adarobin
    Novice I
    3 years ago
    At the last job we were able to present the datastore volume read-only to just the backup host from our Compellent. Restores would fail without write, so you'd just have to flip that setting if you were wanting to restore or designate a single volume as being read-write to use as a restore target.
  • tom_borcher's avatar
    tom_borcher
    Novice I
    3 years ago
    What backup vendor do you use? Have you consulted them? They might be able to give you some guidance about this and if there are any real risk in connecting/mapping volumes in the normal r/w way.
  • adarobin's avatar
    adarobin
    Novice I
    3 years ago
    We talked to IBM and they recommended not using SAN transport mode which seems insane to me. When we use NBD we end up being throttled by the firewall that the ESXi management interfaces are behind.
  • tom_borcher's avatar
    tom_borcher
    Novice I
    3 years ago
    Yeah, that doesn't seem like a good suggestion from IBM if you are throttled by your firewall or network connections. Is it a network bandwidth issue or something that the firewall is actually doing to slow it down? (Not that I can really help with that - just curious, I guess. When we forget to map a new volume to NetBackup, it seems to backup just as fast with NBD. But I guess if all our volumes had to use NBD, it might be an issue.)