VMS .. bleuughh ... like to make life fun for yourself
My VMS voodoo is weak (it died long ago in college days), but I would think the general process you want would be :
The following is based on the detail that the snapshots are not being exported to the same VMS host as the source volumes ? (things get fun doing that as the OS could just say "Hey these are my same volumes!" and do weird things) ... your VMS admin might be able to work with that scenario but lets present you have a production VMS server and a backup VMS server.
1) Create a snap of each virtual volume
2) Create a volume set (called say "backup_vms" for this example)
3) Add the snapshot volumes you created to the volume set "backup_vms"
4) Perform an update of all the snapshots at once by running updatevv against the volume set :
"updatevv -removeandrecreate set:backup_vms"
- make sure your 3PAR user has the "updatevv" ACL set (see "showacl" and "setacl")
That'll give you a consistent set of snaps, they'll all have been done at the same time (important for volume managers).
The "-removeandrecreate" option basically lets you keep the same WNNs for each snapshot when you update them (OSs and volume managers like that and essential for in a few steps time ...)
5) Export the snapshot volumes to the VMS host
- Export the snaps individually, DO NOT export the volume set ... exporting volume sets to hosts is the work of the devil and you will regret it even though is sounds oh so useful!
6) Have your VMS admin import the volumes, mount up whatever volume managers and filesystems are there and prove it is good.
So 1 to 6 will get your snaps visible to your backup VMS server. When you want to refresh those snapshots you'd do something like the following :
1) VMS admin unmounts the filesystems/logical volumes that were mounted from the snapshot volumes.
2) On the source VMS server quiese, flush the filesystem caches so everything gets written to the source 3PAR volumes so you can get as clean a snap as possible (or if a database go into hotbackup mode or equivilant)
3) Run the updatevv command "updatevv -removeandrecreate set:backup_vms" to get a refreshed copy of the snapshots
4) VMS admin mounts the filesystems/logical volumes from the snapshots
Easy! Apart from the VMS admin stuff, you are on your own for that!
If you have VMS, you should have old VMS admins, they'll understand this concept as similar to BCVs and such.