Backup & Recovery

We have 120 VMs which needs to be backed up via VDR. The total size of the VMs plus data ia around 7TB. From anyones experience of VDR, how big the disks needs to be added to the VDR appliance to dump the backup files?

Thanks

R

No one actually knows. It all depends on how many restore points do you want to keep, how many new data is generated between backups, type of data - different deduplication levels can be achieved.

IMHO 7TB is no way for VDR, too big and too complex. Use advanced tools from 3rd party instead on such data volumes and VM numbers. I would definitely recommend Veeam Backup, but also take a look at esXpress and vRanger.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

Thanks. We are using Backupexec12.5 with VCB to take snapshots of backups to tapes directly. It works well but we got few VMs which have huge disk space such as 800GB. Taking a snapshot of such VMs is taking for ever. As you may know that you can't do differential backups on using VCB hence we run full VCB backup one a week and run differential backups for same VMs using Backupexec remote agents.

How can you backup big VMs as VCB won't let you select which vmdk you include int he snapshot? I assume the same issue is on the VDR?

Raj

So you have to upgrade these huge VMs to VM hardware 7 and enable Changed Block Tracking for them so only first backup will be full and all others will be actually incremental. But VCB does not support it AFAIK.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

...It works well but we got few VMs which have huge disk space such as 800GB. Taking a snapshot of such VMs is taking for ever. As you may know that you can't do differential backups on using VCB hence we run full VCB backup one a week and run differential backups for same VMs using Backupexec remote agents.

...

You could mount the VM with VCB with '... -t file' to do a differential backup of the files within the VM.

Often asked - never answered directly. The correct answer is "it depends" :smileywink:

Apart from the fact that VDR is limited to 100 vm's it really depends on how much redundant data is stored (and empty blocks) and how similar the vm's are. If they are all created from the same template you will have the chance that the deduplication rate is higher than if all of them were very unique. The retention policy is another important factor in respect of the dedupe capacity you need.

I have to protect 70 vm's with about 4TB total capacity. I am able to backup all of them to a single dedupe store of 1TB size, with 350GB currently not used. So all my vm's are shrinked to 650GB total. But this is just an example. As every environment is somewhat unique you may find different results.

Please note that VDR is tested with a maximum of 2 dedupe stores with a 1TB max each. So this is another limitation that you have to keep in mind.

In large environments it is recommended to use another solution than VDR.

good feedbacks and replies