VMware Cloud Community
jwwags922
Contributor
Contributor
‎06-16-2011 12:41 PM

NDMP backups of NFS datastores

Hi,

We are planning a major conversion from vmfs to NFS based datastores.  We would run Netapps SMVI to maintain snapshot's for all day to day backups. The only other requirement we have is to take Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly fulls, and archive them to tape.

If I take an SMVI snapshot of a volume, it would take care of vmware consistency. In other words, all the guests would be consistent.

Can I then simply take an NDMP backup of this snapshot to tape? I haven't done much with NDMP before, I'm interested in it's pros and cons.

We are using networker. We could easily either NFS mount the snapshot directly to a networker storage node, or we could zone some fc tape drives directly to the NetApp filer.   The datastores are likely to be pretty large. ~4TB when fully hydrated.

Any comments and experiences are greatly appreciated.

Jason

0 Kudos
2 Replies
vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal
‎06-16-2011 12:58 PM

Hello.

Note: This discussion was moved from the VMware vSphere Storage community to the Backup & Recovery community.

If I take an SMVI snapshot of a volume, it would take care of vmware  consistency. In other words, all the guests would be consistent.

Can  I then simply take an NDMP backup of this snapshot to tape? I haven't  done much with NDMP before, I'm interested in it's pros and cons.

Taking a backup of the snapshot volume wouldn't get you what you are looking for, as the snapshots are worthless without the base disks.  You will want to use Networker to grab the entire NFS volume, if I remember correctly.  I had a similar setup with Tivoli, but it was a long time ago and the specifics are a bit lost.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
0 Kudos
jwwags922
Contributor
Contributor
‎06-16-2011 01:15 PM

I kind of have to disagree with you there. I found several threads that indicate people do NDMP backups of snapshots. Here is one of them:

http://communities.netapp.com/message/18071?tstart=-1

TheNDMP backup must Re-Hydrate the pointers to the data inside the volume. Any blocks that have changed inside the volume get copied to the snapshot reserve, so it is a true point in time copy. This is sort of a must, because the vmdk's themselves would be changing all the time and NDMP would probably not do very with "open files" or something..

Can I get a single vmdk from tape and restore it to a different location with an NDMP backup?

What other options do I have to get an NFS datastore to tape? I am willing to entertain any ideas.

0 Kudos