[OpenIndiana-discuss] Is there any implementation of VSS for a ZFS iSCSI snapshot on Solaris?

[Geoff Nordli]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 6:16 AM, Leonid Korokh <lkorokh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> When you are exporting block device via ISCSI to Windows host, Windows see
> it like a direct attached scsi disk. VSS is the feature of Windows and it
> works on block level of the disk device. So snapshots made by VSS will not
> be seen as zfs snapshots and vise versa. Moreover there are no command in
> SCSI protocol that describes snapshot functionality.  As i know for now
> there is no existing implementation of VSS provider that can integrate
> snapshot functionality from zfs and NTFS. And as I can see it will never be
> done because it's really hard to implement VSS+zfs snapshot provider for
> Windows.
> ________________________________________

Hi Leonid.

You are right that VSS will not be seen as ZFS snapshots.

When doing a backup you create a VSS shadow copy, then you take a ZFS
snapshot of the volume(s).  When you want to restore, you attach the
ZFS volume(s) to the Windows host, then you assign a drive letter to
the VSS shadow copy.  In essence it becomes a two step process.

This document describes it pretty well:
http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=5305

Geoff