Vmware Data Recovery & Netbackup

[architects]

Hi,

We have a small customer enviroment with around 100 servers, all of them using Netback agent for backing up. We are looking to virtualize around 30 of these servers using Vsphere & utilize the Data Recovery option for backup and restore. I have a few doubts if anyone could help:

1. What happens to Symantec agents afterwards since if i understand correctly, the data recovery plugin + applicane is a backup mechanism in itself and does not require any other backup software ? Is that true?

2. The data recovery backup appliance- Does this have to be a VM only or can it be installed as a physical server as well? I am planning to keep this with Vcenter server...Any advice??

3. How does it solve the bandwidth problem since if i understand correctly it would utilize the LAN network to send all the backup traffic while with VCB's i could offload all the traffic to SAN and save network bandwidth.

Regards,

Abhi

[AndreTheGiant]

1. What happens to Symantec agents afterwards since if i understand correctly, the data recovery plugin + applicane is a backup mechanism in itself and does not require any other backup software ? Is that true?

No agent is required for VDR.

But I suggest to still use the traditional backup solution agent based for your application, to do granular restore of mail, DB data, AD objects and so on...

2. The data recovery backup appliance- Does this have to be a VM only or can it be installed as a physical server as well? I am planning to keep this with Vcenter server...Any advice??

It works only on a VM.

It's a dedicated VM, you just deploy it as a appliance.

3. How does it solve the bandwidth problem since if i understand correctly it would utilize the LAN network to send all the backup traffic while with VCB's i could offload all the traffic to SAN and save network bandwidth.

For this problem consider to to still VCB and/or check with version of Netbackup do you have.

With some edition (from 6.5) you can have native VMware integration.

Andre

[geddam]

Answers

1. What happens to Symantec agents afterwards since if i understand

correctly, the data recovery plugin + applicane is a backup mechanism

in itself and does not require any other backup software ? Is that true?

Ans: Yes.

2. The data recovery backup appliance- Does this have to be a VM only

or can it be installed as a physical server as well? I am planning to

keep this with Vcenter server...Any advice??

Ans: Yes, it has to be a virtual appliance...There is software version as such.

3. How does it solve the bandwidth problem since if i understand

correctly it would utilize the LAN network to send all the backup

traffic while with VCB's i could offload all the traffic to SAN and

save network bandwidth.

Ans: This is not true, when you deploy it as a virtual appliance, you can attach a SAN LUN or a VMDK file for backup destination, which again uses the same SAN path.

Refer, VDR documentation for any detailed info...http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vdr_pubs.html

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V), SNIA SCP.

Please award points, if helpful

[vmroyale]

Hello.

NetBackup is a pretty comprehensive enterprise-level package that works well with virtual machines. If you don't mind my asking, why you are considering the use of Data Recovery instead of leveraging this existing investment for backups?

Good Luck!

[architects]

HI All.

Thanks for the quick replies.

Vmroyale: Let me give you a quick background iof what i was trying to do and what happend.

We currently have a physical env. & as i said, it is getting backed up normally with Netbackup agents on all the servers. The original idea was to implement virtualization using ESX 3.5 and introduce VCB proxy servers to offload all the load from the new ESX hosts and backup to SAN directly bypassing the LAN however since Vmware announced the discontinuity of VCB i am thinking of changing the idea to use the Vsphere Data recovery option and maybe still use the netbackup agents (granular restores for applications) however am not sure if that's a viable soilution. The reason i don't want to use LAN for any backup traffic is because we have 1Gig N/W in our DC and it will become a bottleneck while backing up the VM's.

I hope this helps. Let me know what would be the best solution in this case or am i going the right way? What confuses me is that if i even go with backing up the VMDK's directly to SAN in this solution, i would still make my ESX overloaded with all the VM's having to process data for backup which was not the case with VCB proxy.

Does that help?

[architects]

Hi Geddam,

I would like to revisit point 3 with you. Don't you think even though you attach a SAN LUN for backup all the backup processing would happen at the VM level (Netbackup agent) which would kill the ESX host?

I agree with the idea that attaching a SAN LUN would probably eliminate the network path for sending the back data though.

What do you think?

[vmroyale]

We currently have a physical env. & as i said, it is getting backed up normally with Netbackup agents on all the servers. The original idea was to implement virtualization using ESX 3.5 and introduce VCB proxy servers to offload all the load from the new ESX hosts and backup to SAN directly bypassing the LAN however since Vmware announced the discontinuity of VCB i am thinking of changing the idea to use the Vsphere Data recovery option and maybe still use the netbackup agents (granular restores for applications) however am not sure if that's a viable soilution. The reason i don't want to use LAN for any backup traffic is because we have 1Gig N/W in our DC and it will become a bottleneck while backing up the VM's.

NetBackup 7 can make use of VCB or the vStorage APIs for complete virtual machine image backups. VCB is being phased out, but if you have the ability to use NetBackup 7, then you still have a method to reach you original concept. One other added bonus of the NetBackup agents is that you can potentially get better levels of consistency for your customer data - specifically things like database and mail servers. I also like the idea of a single interface/product/procedure for all backups, as this can significantly simplify operational tasks. I wish it was as easy as saying "use this," but there are always too many variables at work with backups.

[Brian_Smith1]

Disclaimer: I work for Symantec.

Thanks vmroyale for the accurate response.

Sorry if I'm repeating anything, but you can transition from VCB to vStorage APIs and continue to use NetBackup.

First, regarding VCB, it is supported with ESX 3.x and ESX 4.0. You will not lose VCB support until you upgrade to a TBA post-4.0 release.

If you are using NetBackup 6.5.x, you can use VCB to protect your ESX 3.x and ESX 4.0 environments.

When upgrading to NetBackup 7, the new vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) will be used. VADP has these minimum requirements:

- ESX 3.5 U2 or later

- Or, vCenter 2.5 or later (when communicating with VC2.5, older ESX 3.x versions can be protected)

If you do not meet those minimum VADP requirements, then NetBackup 7 will use VCB.

Regardless of whether VCB or VADP, NetBackup supports SAN, LAN, and "hotadd" transports. "Hotadd" means that NetBackup can be installed into a VM, and will backup directly from the datastore, and not over the SAN/LAN virtual network stack.

Other notes:

- VADP supports Block-level Incremental Backup. But this requires ESX changed-block-tracking, with a minimum rev of ESX 4.0.

- NetBackup 7 supports integrated deduplication. This means that a media server can now have a deduplication-storage-pool. Any/all backups (including VMs) that are stored in the pool are deduplicated. This means that NetBackup can deduplicate across virtual and physical machines.

I'm happy to explain more offline. Contact me via email: brian_smith@symantec.com

Or you can see a "NetBackup for VMware" webcast at www.netbackupdemo.com

[architects]

thanks Brian....by the time you replied i had done all my research and got these answers however none the less, this helps!

Thank you once again all for your responses.

Thanks & Regards,

Abhishek