EMC SAN and refreshing snapshots

[Larry]

We have a new SAN -- Yahoooo.

This may not be the correct forum to do this but if someone knows of a
better place please tell me :)

Our envinronment - Windows 2000 - oracle 9i Yeah yeah Oracle on
windows who would figure but a CEO and Vice president . SAN is running
Clariion, NaviCLI,ADMSNAP, SNAPVIEW

We have several R&D databases that are copies of production. What we
want is to make a BCV(clone) of production and then make snapshots for
R&D from that BCV. In some cases we want to refresh the snapshot
daily.

We were told that if we used command line scripts we could drop the
snap which drops the partition mapping to that drive in windows,
recreate the snap, and then activate the snap which would 'recreate'
the partition mapping in windows, and we would not have to reboot the
server to see the updated partition.

We can do all of this except it forces us to reboot the server to see
the partition. It is also making us go into Disk Management and assign
a drive letter and activate the partition. This is great except there
are to many manual steps. We don't want night ops having to do this
every day.

I don't think we are asking for anything to strange. Has anyone had
experience with this.

EMC's Help desk is not really helpfull. You would think they would
know since they sold it :)

Thanks

[hb38]

Helo,

may be you've try some scripts already.
I'm using snapshot for faster backup, and all the snaps are assign to letter on windows. it works better with my new windows 2003, with windows 2000 I was obliged to put some SLEEP command to wait for P'n'P .

My subtility :

admsnap.exe flush -o X: (on source server, to empty the cache)
navicli.exe snapview -startsession %SESSIONNAME% ... (from every where you want)
admsnap.exe activate -s %SESSIONNAME% -d %DRIVE_you want% (from target server)

and often you
powermt.exe check force
powermt.exe config

in order to force refresh your disk (instead of using Disk Manager)

hope it will help you ;)