To prepare the snapshot mirrors in order to create a snapshot from the VEA or from the vxsnap command line, you can use either of the following methods:
The Prepare command from the VEA
The vxsnap prepare command from the CLI
You repeat the VEA console Prepare operation or vxsnap prepare command to prepare a mirror for each volume associated with the Exchange storage group.
The snapshot mirrors remain attached to the original volumes and continue to be updated until you use the VSS Exchange Snapshot Wizard, the vxsnap create command, or the VSS Exchange Snapshot Scheduler Wizard to create the snapshot set.
For the snapshot volumes, make sure to select disks or LUNs that are not used for production data. You can create more than one snapshot volume on the same disk as long as there is sufficient space available and as long as the snapshots are of different production volumes.
To create the snapshot mirrors using the VEA console
Verify that the lower pane of the VEA console indicates that the resynchronization process is complete before creating the snapshot set.
To create the snapshot mirrors using the command line
vxsnap prepare component=SG2/writer="Microsoft Exchange Writer" source=G:/harddisk=harddisk4 source=H:/harddisk=harddisk4 source=I:/harddisk=harddisk5
In this example, snapshot mirrors for the database volumes mounted at G: and H: are created on disk 4 and a snapshot mirror for the log volume mounted at I: is created on disk 5.
The complete syntax of the vxsnap prepare command is:
vxsnap prepare component=<componentName>/writer=<writerName> [-b][source=<volume>/harddisk=<harddisk,...>] ...]
See vxsnap prepare.