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Administration best practices
21 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Windows Server Best Practices | 680-042-007
representing only the data that has changed since the last snapshot. Active volumes will generally have larger
snapshots because more data is changing.
Choose a built-in snapshot profile or create a custom profile to suit your needs. Figure 10 shows a custom
Hourly-Daily-Weekly profile with schedule rules that expire hourly snapshots more frequently than weekly
snapshots so only snapshots that are needed longer term are retained longer term.
Built-in and custom snapshot profiles
SC Series snapshots allow administrators to do the following in Windows Server environments:
• Create View Volumes that can be used to provision an isolated test environment that matches the
production environment
• Recover a server to a previous point in time
• Provision new servers from a gold image, saving admin time and conserving SAN space
Create gold images to deploy servers from View Volumes for quick provisioning
SC Series snapshots can be taken of volumes mapped as LUNs to a Windows Server environment
regardless of content or transport used. This applies to data volumes, cluster volumes, cluster shared
volumes (CSV), pass-through disks, and in-guest iSCSI or virtual FC volumes. These volumes can also be
replicated to another SC Series array for DR or other purposes.