Second NIC for Backups

[StuartGT]

Please bare with me as I am completely new to Virtualization.

We are beginning our journey into virtualizing our environment.

Currently 100 Physical Win2k3 boxes which eventually we would like to consolidate down to 50 or so Virtual

ESX 4.1

we have hp c7000 w/ 4 bl490cs,72gb ram in each

San is a hp eva 4400 with two shelves w/ 450gb drives

Our vsphere license is for enterprise plus

I am sure I will have hundreds more questions later but am curious how a best practice we currently use in our physical environment translates into the virtual world.

Scenario

Currently, for each of our physical servers we have always installed a second NIC which was dedicated as a Backup NIC, meaning our Netbackup 6.0 Master Server comminicated with its 100 or so windows clients solely on that 2nd NIC to perform its backup thereby separating and isolating backup traffic from normal traffic on the servers.

Question

We will assume that the Netbackup 6.0 Master Server and its companion Quantum Tape Library will continue to be physical boxes communicating with the VM's living in the equipment noted above.

In the virtual world, once we have moved the physical servers to virtual, would this "dual nic" best practice be either neccessary or even functional ? Would the network traffic generated by the backups truly be dedicated to that 2nd virtual NIC or does it all sit in the cloud anyway and doesnt matter ?

It seems to me that it wouldnt make any difference but before I begin planning my backup jobs I would like to be certain.

Thanks in advance for your asnwers.

StuartGT

[FranckRookie]

Hi Stuart,

Welcome to the forums.

It is always a best practice to isolate backup network from production, even in a virtual infrastructure.

If you continue to use your physical server for the backups, you should keep two cards in every VM.

Create a vSwitch for production network with one or several cards. Create another vSwitch dedicated to backup network, with its own physical cards, connected to the same network as your physical backup server. In each VM, attach one vNic to the prod vSwitch and the other one to the backup.

The design will greatly depend on your physical network configuration. If you have two separated physical networks on the LAN, you will need to dedicate cards in your ESX as well. If you have a single switch and you can use VLANs, you can share your pNics on the ESX, attach them to your two vSwitches but using VLANs to separate the flows.

Regards

Franck

[Jackobli]

This is VMware Community forum for VMware Server 1. Any administrator please move the thread to the appropriate forum (ESXi 4?).

Are your phyiscal servers connected through GBit?

I don't know exactly your EVA (14 spindles on each shelve?) and the according RAID level it does. I wouldn't primary worry about network but about disk IO. Depending on the amount of data, you are backing up, there would be a quite large IO storm, when backing up from SAN to ESXi and then back to your backup servers.

Think about alternative backup scenarios. Spread in time? Backing up the vmdk directly on SAN? Have a look into the different backup vendors that support ESX directly (any, like VEEAM or others).

Perhaps it helps to explain what kind of servers (database, web) these are and what you are backing up (full, diff, # of backups you keep in retention).

[AWo]

Thread moved to the vSphere backup forum.

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

\[:o]===\[o:]

=Would you like to have this posting as a ringtone on your cell phone?=

=Send "Posting" to 911 for only $999999,99!=