What is SMVI?
Although from the sound of it, it appears that SMVI is related to other SnapManager products like SnapManager for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Oracle, SnapManager for VI is not related to specific applications. SVMI rather serves as a medium to streamline the backup and restores of Virtual Machines and/or Datastores in a VMware environment. It interacts with VC or the ESX server and NetApp Storage devices and creates instantaneous backups and near-instantaneous restores of Virtual Machines and/or Datastores. 
What's supported?
From a protocol standpoint all VMware protocols are supported, meaning FC, iSCSI and NFS. FC and iSCSI with this release are supported with VMFS.
What can you backup and Restore?
You can backup at the Datastore level and Restore at the VM level or the Datastore level. 
Where can you restore a VM?
You can restore it on the original Datastore or a different Datastore. SVMI provides a listing of all existing datastore and you basically get to choose the one you want. Furthermore, you have the option to mount the backup and verify its contents.
SnapMirror integration? 
SVMI supports integration with SnapMirror so upon creating a Snapshot a Snapmirror update will occur.
SMVI components
SVMI has a client based and server based component. The server will be typically 
installed on the Virtual Center server, although not required, and the client portion can be installed in your laptop if you'd like or you can install both server/client in the Virtual Center server. SVMI can be driven both by GUI or CLI.
How does it backup?
SMVI temporarily leverages VMware's snapshot which makes calls to the LGTO_sync (lgtosync.sys) driver part of the VMware tools which is responsible for flushing dirty buffers to disk for filesystem consistency and creates a Redo Log (Redo Log is a misnomer, it's actually a bitmap) for storing disk changes. We keep the VMware snapshot around until we complete our Snapshot (NetApp) on the array side, which takes no more than a few seconds, at which point we delete the vmware snapshot, thereby merging the changes in the "redo log" with the original VMDK.
SVMI is currently in Beta and will be available for in the very near future.
RMSE is a dead product.RM is the product which replaced RMSE and has the functionality very similar or even more than SMVI. It makes uses of VC API to take snapshots of VMFS and to mount the snapshot to the ESX.
Posted by: Anonymous | January 15, 2009 at 06:17 AM
Anomymous,
Thanks for commenting. I don't know how familiar you are with SMVI, but in any case, SMVI does use VC APIs and it does provide for the mounting of Snapshots onto an ESX host regardless of the underline protocol.
Posted by: Nick Triantos | January 15, 2009 at 07:36 AM