Setup Scheduled Immutable Snapshots on Unity

Hello everyone, and welcome to a another video in the How To series.

This one today, we're going to be looking at setting up scheduled immutable snapshots on the Unity range. So it's something that has to be done by command line, so it's not too difficult, but we thought it'd be a good a good subject to make a small video on.

So my name is Richard Hornsby. I'm a pre sales engineer for Nexsan, and we're joined by Kevin green, who's a storage consultant for Nexsan. So Kevin's doing all the hard work. He's doing the driving for the demo. So let's get on with it. I'll just hand straight over to you, Kevin. Thank you.

Hi everyone. This is an actual training session on how to use what we call immutable cron, basically how to set up immutable snapshots within the Unity first thing you're going to need to do is log on to your Unity console with NX admin and obviously the password.

Two steps, first that will help you later on. If you, first of all, go to cluster status and then IP Configuration and get your inter system virtual IP, that's the best way of logging on to the putty system, where we're going to use the command line.

Second if you go to storage and because we're going to do immutable snapshots on file systems or LUNs, we need to know which one we're going to choose. I'm going to choose runs. I'm going to make sure I know the name of the LUN and its formatting. So capital N, capital L, U, n1, it has to be case sensitive. Okay, from there, let's open putty.

192,five, login again as NX, admin
password.

Let's bring this full screen for everybody to see,

From here I'm going to type in "immutable Cron".

This gives me all the menu options. So as you can see from an example of the command line, immutable cron, I need the command so minus c, add, remove, clear, show, test.

F would be for the share or the lung. Name
R is for retention in days.
E is for recurrence, okay?

And this case, we're going to do it using these first few you can obviously go to minutes, hours and days, and that can be further found down here. We're going to keep it simple, just to give you an insight. So type in the "immutable cron", minus
C for command, add minus F, and I'm going to choose lun one remember capitalization, minus R for retention. And I'm going to do one day, one day space, minus E, and I'm going to do 24 hours.

Obviously, if I wanted to, I could do one and that would give me every hour for one day. And you'll soon find out, when we press enter, it'll give you an identification one day's retention, every hour every day. So that means using this figure, I could mount a snapshot going back every hour for one day. That's a great idea from a remutable point of view.

Now I want to see that, because somebody wants me to show them what's happened. So the easiest way is command show
you go..

Yeah, and you can see that it's done it on them. It's done it on both lungs. Well, both, sorry, both controllers as well, isn't it?

You can see that, yeah, yeah. That's the key thing there these two, controller one, controller two.

So that is important to see and understand, because it is a an active, active system. So if I want to remove it, because obviously I've made a mistake, and I actually wanted that every hour for two days, I can go back to the mutable cron command, same as we did before, minus C for command this time remove minus F for the name, non one, minus R for the retention, which was 24 remember right up one hour. No, it wasn't.

You've got 24 you can do both.

Yeah, I'll do both. I must have created two. So that's that one.

Let's go back to show and see where it still thinks is there?

Okay, yeah, just this is the one I asked for. 24 Yeah. So again, reply, 24 remove.

It's so easy. It to create them and remove them. As you can see, it's so easy to maybe put a typo in, make a mistake and realize you need to remove it. Just go and use the Remove command.

Yeah, it's good. It just means, you know, if you wanted to schedule immutable kind of snapshots, you can, you know, because we can't down the GUI yet, you can just do kind of manual, you know, immutable snapshots. So it's just nice to say, you know, I want to snapshot this loan or this file system, you know, whichever time of the day it is. It just gives you that nice, kind of warm feeling that you are getting those snapshots done automatically. You don't have to think about it. So now that's great.

One thing to remember, extra guys that literally, that's where we currently set the immutable snapshots. If you're wanting to just set a normal VSS snapshot that's from within the GUI. If you wanted to roll back or mount an immutable snapshot or browse it that's also in the GUI, the command line is only required to actually create the immutable snapshot.

Thank you very much. Kevin, hopefully anyone watching that found that helpful, and we'll see you again for the next video in the How To series.

Thank you very much. Guys.
Bye.

Cheers, everyone.