Backup solution for ~2000 VM's

[farkasharry]

Opening up a thread for exchange of thoughts and experiences about backup of greater vmware environments. ~2000 VM's with ~100 TB of data volume.

Requirements are:

1. Data Backup should run as fast as possible

2. File Level recovery is a very nice to have

3. Deduplication is a must at this amount

4. No guest agents!

5. Fast recovery

Any thoughts, hints and opinions are appreciated

[arturka]

HI

Veeam backup for VMware and I think Symantec Backup Exec, but I'm not sure if it has all what you need. But if you wanna have very fast backup and reliable solution use Veeam

Cheers

Artur

Visit my blog

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Symantec's NetBackup gets you all of that.  There would be lots of pieces and licenses involved, and that would be a complicated part of it.  I have talked with Cofio, who had an interesting product as well.  They might be worth looking into, and I think they just came out with a new release.

Good Luck!

[EdWilts]

NetBackup would work well if you're NOT an NFS shop.  For NFS, NetBackup pushes all of the data through the VirtualCenter system.  Symantec's explanation is that the vStorage API doesn't consider NFS shared storage...

[sugadada]

You should also check out PHD Virtual that uses virtual appliance to run its dedupe backups.  They also offer the option to do FLR.  Here's a link for more detailed information about their product:

http://www.phdvirtual.com/overview

[jamesbowling]

Veeam will provide the requested points.  Another thing to think about is retention and whether or not you will be doing only Disk-to-Disk or Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape.  If you are looking to spin to tape then you will need both Veeam and something like Symantec BackupExec.

[jamesbowling]

The best thing to do is to run some proof of concepts with various vendors stuff.  I would recommend testing a few different ones to see what suits your environment best.  From my experiences, I have had great success with Veeam's product.

[arturka]

James Bowling wrote:

Veeam will provide the requested points.  Another thing to think about is retention and whether or not you will be doing only Disk-to-Disk or Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape.  If you are looking to spin to tape then you will need both Veeam and something like Symantec BackupExec.

That's true, BTW, Tivoli Storage Manager works really well as a TAPE backend for Veeam

Cheers

Artur

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Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

[farkasharry]

Does anyone has experiences with the TSM-VE (Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments)?

[arturka]

farkasharry wrote:

Does anyone has experiences with the TSM-VE (Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments)?

Hi

Personaly I don't have experience but few days ago I spoke with IBM folks and they told me they know of a couple of customers who are using TSM4VE but without much  success so far. I think the product is still a bit young and Tivoli need to  work out through some scalability and performance issues.

BTW, soon I should have hands on experience cause we have TSM and we wanna give a try to do test for TSM4VE in our environment

Cheers

Artur

Visit my blog

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

[depping]

I've always found TSM overly complicated to be honest. I personally prefer Commvault. It is a simple straight forward solution which does what it says it does without too many bells and whistles which one never needs.

Duncan

Yellow-Bricks.com

vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive - eBook | Paper

[ldelloca]

I've seen it at a customer's environment, about 400 VMs on 30 hosts, but I do not have any feedback right now.

Seems to me too it's still young, I've seen TSM used VCB and switched to vStorage API not so far ago, while vStorage APIs came out with vSphere 4 2 years ago and many competitors supported it from day 1.

I would personally go with Veeam, licensing is by socket (or by number of VM based on having vspp license), and there is no limit by number of veeam servers, so it can scale by creating multiple veeam installation that runs side by side.

Regards,
Luca.

--

Luca Dell'Oca

http://www.vuemuer.it

@dellock6

vExpert 2011

[petedr]

I would suggest doing some benchmark testing of some of the suggestions above, they are valid in the marketplace. One thing I do suggest is to put some load on the solution to try and simulate as close as you can to the 2000+ VM load.

Pete

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www.liquidwarelabs.com

www.thevirtualheadline.com