how about backup?

[ALEX_TSM]

Hello, which is the best way to backup/restore the appstack volumes?

Are there any problems if i just create VM and add appstack volumes as disks to it?

So, i can backup entire vm and restore the individual appstack volumes as vmdk

What have i missed?)

[pchapman]

Essentially, yes, check out the appvolumes backup fling

App Volumes Backup Utility

[Ray_handels]

That thing is ment to be for writable volumes. To this day we are waiting for a decent backup mechanism which would be nice to have.

But because of the nature of how Appvolumes works you can also just copy the Appstacks from 1 datastore (or even specific folder on the datastore if you have NFS) to another folder and voila, you have your backups.

We have multiple datastores and let the appstacks sync from 1 store to another that's also a disater recovery backup if one of 2 datastores fail.

Regarding the writables, these are only placed on one of both datastores. We have written a script, use 2 Windows servers with an NFS client and copy the VMDK's from one datastore to another. For us it works prety well. And restore is very easy, just copy back the file from the backup location to the production folder.

You could try and use Veeam as it can also backup disks and folders on NFS storage. Downside to this is that it will bloat the disk to thick provisioned. If you have a few thousand writables with maybe only a few 100MB in it you would need very large backup capacity. For small enviornments it might be an option.

[ALEX_TSM]

Thanks, for your reply

Lucky for us we don't use writable volumes)

But, why I can't use VEEAM to backup a writable volume as a part of one VM disk i mentioned before?

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/evaluation/backup/vsphere/en/virtual_disk_restore.html

As i know, VEEAM doesn't convert vmdk if you don't ask him to do that.

In the case of using Veeam, as i can see, you can get many restore point of single volume which is more reliable even though you allways do a full backup.

And it is a native method without writing any line of code.

[Ray_handels]

We tested Veeam a year back, might be that it changed.

The problem is that you need to backup the information to some other device. The moment you copy the file from the NFS store to, let's say, tape it will blow up the disk to 20GB even though thin provisioned it would be just 500MB.

If you only have appstacks it is certainly a valid way to backup those files.

If you happen to have an option to copy/backup the VMDK's and keeping them thin provisoned please let me know. Very interested in that.

I must say that my veeam knowledge isn't that big

And looking at that link it seems as if you need a VM to attach the disk to. That would mean a manual action and you would need that machine to restore the appstack.