Veritas Storage Foundation™ 5.0.1 for Oracle RAC Installation, Configuration, and Administrator's Guide Extracts for the HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite on HP-UX 11i v3

5 Using FlashSnap for Backup and Recovery
This chapter contains the following topics:
• “About Veritas Database FlashSnap” (page 49)
• “Planning to Use Database FlashSnap” (page 52)
• “Preparing Hosts and Storage for Database FlashSnap ” (page 53)
• “Summary of Database Snapshot Steps” (page 60)
• “Creating a Snapplan (dbed_vmchecksnap)” (page 65)
• “Validating a Snapplan (dbed_vmchecksnap)” (page 69)
• “Displaying, Copying, and Removing a Snapplan (dbed_vmchecksnap)” (page 71)
• “Creating a Snapshot (dbed_vmsnap)” (page 72)
• “Backing Up the Database from Snapshot Volumes (dbed_vmclonedb)” (page 74)
• “Cloning a Database (dbed_vmclonedb)” (page 76)
• “Resynchronizing the Snapshot to Your Database ” (page 81)
• “Removing a Snapshot Volume” (page 82)
About Veritas Database FlashSnap
Veritas Database FlashSnap helps to create a point-in-time copy of a database for backup and
off-host processing. Database FlashSnap allows you to make backup copies of your volumes
online with minimal interruption to users.
• “Solving Typical Database Problems with Database FlashSnap” (page 50)
• “About Database FlashSnap Applications” (page 50)
• “Using Database FlashSnap” (page 50)
• “Using Database FlashSnap Commands” (page 51)
• “Using Database FlashSnap Options” (page 52)
Veritas Database FlashSnap is included with HP Serviceguard for Oracle RAC.
Database FlashSnap lets you capture an online image of an actively changing database at a given
instant, known as a snapshot. You can perform backups and off-host processing tasks on snapshots
while providing continuous availability of your critical data. Database FlashSnap commands
can be executed from the command-line.
Veritas Database FlashSnap offers you a flexible way to efficiently manage multiple point-in-time
copies of your data, and reduce resource contention on your business-critical servers.
Database FlashSnap allows database administrators to create a consistent copy of a database
without root privileges by creating a snapshot. A snapshot copy of the database is referred to as
a database snapshot.
You can use a database snapshot on the same host as the production database or on a secondary
host sharing the same storage. A database snapshot can be used for off-host processing
applications, such as backup, data warehousing, and decision-support queries. When the snapshot
is no longer needed, the database administrator can import the original snapshot back to the
primary host and resynchronize the snapshot to the original database volumes.
Database FlashSnap can significantly reduce the time it takes to backup your database, increase
the availability of your production database, and still maintain your production database’s
performance.
NOTE: To use Database FlashSnap, you must have HP Serviceguard for Oracle RAC on all
systems on which you intend to use Database FlashSnap.
To use Database FlashSnap, you must first configure the volumes used by the database.
About Veritas Database FlashSnap 49