Creating a vault relationship from a source volume

You can create a vault relationship between a source volume and a destination volume from the source volume, and assign a vault policy to it to create a backup vault. In the event of data loss or corruption on a system, backed-up data can be restored from the backup vault destination.

Before you begin

•	The source and destination clusters must be running Data ONTAP 8.2 or later.

•	The source and destination clusters must be added to System Manager.

If you have added the destination cluster after you have opened the source cluster management window, you must close the management window and log in to the source cluster again to view the destination cluster.

•	The SnapVault license must be enabled on both the source and the destination storage systems or the nodes that contain the source and destination volumes.

•	If you have renamed a cluster after adding it to System Manager, you must have deleted it and added it again.

Otherwise, you cannot create a vault relationship in System Manager.

•	The clusters must not have the same name.

•	If the source and destination clusters are in a peer relationship, the relationship state must be healthy.

Peer relationships might be in an unhealthy state due to various reasons—for example, intercluster LIFs between the clusters are down. In such cases, you might be able to successfully create vault relationships, but subsequent operations, such as initialization might fail.

•	The destination aggregate must have available space.

•	The source aggregate and the destination aggregate must be 64-bit aggregate.

•	A vault (XDP) policy must exist.

If a vault policy does not exist, you must either create one or accept the default vault policy (named XDPDefault) that is automatically assigned.

•	The capacity of the destination volume must be greater than or equal to the capacity of the source volume.

•	If autogrow is disabled, the free space on the destination volume must be at least five percent more than the used space on the source volume.

About this task

System Manager does not support a cascade relationship. For example, a destination volume in a relationship cannot be the source volume in another relationship.

Steps

1.	From the home page, double-click the appropriate storage system.

2.	Expand the Storage Virtual Machines hierarchy in the left navigation pane.

3.	In the navigation pane, select the Storage Virtual Machine (SVM), and click Storage > Volumes.

4.	Select the volume for which you want to create a vault relationship, and click Protect by > Vault.

The Protect by option is available only for a read/write volume.

5.	In the Create Vault Relationship window, specify the cluster and the SVM that contains the destination volume.

If System Manager is unable to retrieve the credentials of the specified cluster, you can use the Authenticate link to enter and save the credentials.

6.	If the source and destination clusters are not in a peer relationship, use the Create Peer link to create a peer relationship between the destination cluster and the source cluster.

7.	Create a new destination volume or select an existing volume:

If you want to...

Do the following...

Create a new volume

a.	If you want to change the default name, displayed in the format source_SVM_name_source_volume_name_vault, specify a new name and select the containing aggregate for the destination volume.

b.	Select Enable Dedupe to enable deduplication on the new destination volume.

If deduplication is disabled on the source volume, then the check box for the new volume is selected by default.

Select an existing volume

Select the Select Volume option.

Note: Only those volumes with the same language attribute as the source volume are listed.

8.	Select an existing policy or create a new policy:

If you want to...	Do the following...
Select an existing policy	Select a vault policy from the list. You can select a policy that has the maximum number of matching labels with the Snapshot policy that is attached to the source volume.
Create a new policy	Click Create Policy, and then specify a policy name, set schedule transfer priority, and click Create. Low indicates that the transfer has the least priority and is usually scheduled after normal priority transfers. By default, the priority is set to normal. You can also specify the SnapMirror label and destination retention count for the vault policy. However, you must ensure that a Snapshot copy with the same label is created on the source volume for the new SnapMirror label to be effective.

9.	Specify a schedule for the relationship:

If...

Do the following...

You want to assign an existing schedule

From the list of schedules, select an existing schedule.

You want to create a new schedule

a.	Click Create Schedule.

b.	Specify a name for the schedule.

c.	Select either Basic or Advanced.

•	Basic: You can select this option to specify only the day of the week, time, and the transfer interval.

•	Advanced: You can select this option to specify a cron style schedule.

d.	Click Create.

You do not want to assign a schedule

Select None.

10.	Select Start Baseline Transfer to initialize the vault relationship.

11.	Click Create.

Result

If you chose to create a new destination volume, a volume of type dp is created with the following default settings:

•	Autogrow is enabled

•	Deduplication is enabled or disabled as per user preference, or the source volume deduplication setting

•	Compression is disabled

•	Language attribute is set to match the language attribute of the source volume

If the destination volume is on a different SVM than the source, then a peer relationship is created between the two SVMs if the relationship did not already exist.

A vault relationship is created between the source volume and the destination volume. The base Snapshot copy is transferred to the destination volume if you have opted to initialize the relationship.

Related reference

Protection window