Hi,
we are in the process of deploying VBR 5 in our vSphere 5 environment and want to use Direct SAN backup within our FC SAN. I've read a lot of posts that say when Windows Automount is enabled it could cause Windows to resignature a presented VMFS volume and thus destroy your VMFS partition (though there are ways to recover from this). Before going live I'd like to test such a scenario - enable automount and let Windows issue a signature to a VMFS volume presented to the VBR server. Then see how to recover from it.
However, I've not been able to produce such a situation. Our VBR server is 2008 R2 SP1 and with automount enabled I've tested the following scenarios:
1.
- created a new LUN on SAN, presented it to an ESXi host and created a VMFS datastore
- presented the LUN (while sill being present to ESXi) to the VBR server
- nothing happended! Windows disk manager just shows the partition as online, healthy and labels it as Primary Partiton.
2.
- created a new LUN on SAN, presented it to an ESXi host and created a VMFS datastore
- unmounted the datastore on ESXi and unpresented the LUN from ESXi
- presented the LUN (while now not being present to ESXi) to the VBR server
- nothing happened - just as above!
So, in what scenario does Windows resignature a disk that is presented to it? Anyone knows?
Thanks
Michael