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euphony
Contributor
Contributor

How to backup deduplication store to tapes using Backupexec

I have add 1TB disk from our fibre san to the VDR backup applicance. Now, I need to take atleast one monthly backup of the deduplication store to tapes as I can't 100% rely on disk-to-disk backups. I am not sure how can I pick this dedup store to tapes using backupexec. Any ideas? Please suggest if anyone done this before.

Thanks

R

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bitbucket
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I am doing daily backups of the dedupe store that is hold by a RDM with virtual compatibility. I described in this thread how I am doing this http://communities.vmware.com/message/1505632#1505632

Regards,

b.

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kopper27
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

so this means you need either RDM o Share network to take to Backups to Tapes?

or I can use VMDK with tapes?

thanks a lot

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bitbucket
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

so this means you need either RDM o Share network to take to Backups to Tapes?

>

or I can use VMDK with tapes?

Yes.

Sounds weird? As long as you use an external storage, you have to use RDM or a network share, to bring the dedupe store to tape. But you can also use a vmdk file as dedupe store and mount that vmdk to another vm to do the tape backup.

Using RDM or vmdk requires a vm that can bring the mounted storage to tape. My 'BackupToTape' vm is located on a ESX with a locally connected tape library (via a dedicated controller). The performance of the tape is near real world in my setup.

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kopper27
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

thanks a lot knowing that it's great at the end I overthinking this since creating a VMDK or RDM is tha same just adding new Hardware...

I won't be doing the tape stuff but I wanted to be sure since I hace to setup the vDR and another buddy will do the TSM and tape stuff but I wanted to be sure so I don't have to redo this again Smiley Wink

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AlbertWT
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hi,

how about backing it up to NFS mount so that backup exec can open it and write it into a tape ?

Kind Regards,

AWT

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bitbucket
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

As far as I know NFS cannot be used as a share. You can use it as a datastore.

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MattseG2
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We do it a bit complicated, but it works quite good:

To take advantage of the higher speed by using NFS instead of CIFS,

i created an additional VMDK to my Win2k3-BackupExec-Server-VM.

I also installed Windows NFS-Services and Auth-Services for Unix. (Important)

Then i created an appropriate User-Account-Mapping for VMware accessing the NFS-Folder.

Now the trick: the NFS-Folder is mounted to ESX4 as a separate datastore.

Then it can be easily mounted as SCSI:0:1 to the VDR-Appliance to host the dedupe-store.

Advantage: The deduplication-store resides now in a Windows-partition covered by Backup-Exec-AOFO,

so theoretically it is not neccessary to regard any Timeslots for backing it up to any Offline-Media.

Only at the beginning of the BE-Backup-Process, there should be no VDR-Backups running to avoid any inconsistencies

or timeouts.

It is running here from VDR 1.0.0 until 1.1.0.707 and there was no interruption of Backup-Jobs at all.

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MattseG2
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Oh, i forgot the most important:

You can do that without having to pay Licenses for Backup-Exec.

It runs with a Basic Server license.

And the performance is quite good, even for VDR-Backups and the following BE-Backups to External-NAS or Tape.

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