I'm migrating all of our infrastructure from Windows Server 2006 to Windows Server 2012 and 2008. With the exception of the backup servers, all will be hosted on vSphere 4.1

The 2003 boxes are backed up by a 2003 server running arcserve. Each host creates a snapshot of its data drive and stores the XML doc on the backup server. The backup server mounts all the snapshots prior to the start of the backup and dismounts them at the end.

The new boxes will be backed up by a 2012 server also running arcserve. My intent is to create the same backup architecture as the 2003 boxes.

Not related to this project, Dell Equallogic support recommended I upgrade to the latest firmware for the array (7.0.4) and the latest HIT software (4.6).

I've upgraded the HIT on Win 2003 to 4.0 (Latest available for 2003).

The 2003 servers continue to work fine with the new firmware and HIT 4.0

The new 2008 servers work fine with the new firmware and HIT 4.6

However, I'm unable to mount a snapshot created with HIT 4.0 on the Backup server running HIT 4.6. It want's to make the HIT 4.0 box (Win 2003) part of its HIT group and of course that can't be done because it wants to remote install HIT 4.6 on the 2003 boxes.

When I try to mount a smart copy created with HIT 4.0/ASMCLI on a machine with HIT 4.6, I receive the error: "Mount Terminated: Smart Copy is incompatible with Operating System". I've created the copy as 'Transportable'.

And, as expected, the same occurs when trying to mount a 4.6 Smart Copy with HIT 4.0.

This has interrupted my migration project as I need to be able to mount the 2003 snapshots on my Windows 2012 backup server.

Does anyone know a way around this problem?

Ken

P.S. a possible workaround would be to mount the source volumes on the backup server, snapshot them dismount them, then mount the snapshots. I know of no way to mount an iSCSI target as read only (because the backup server would want to meddle with the NTFS of a volume that's already mounted on another machine).