ESX 3.5 Backup with Brightstor Linux Agent 11.5 Sp3

[gmoreau]

Hello,

have someone experience backuping ESX 3.5 server with BrightStore Agent ?

My configuration :BAB 11.5 SP3 on W2003 Server, One ESX 3.5 server with direct attachement device and BAB Agent for Linux 3.5 Sp3

I have installed Brightstor Arcserve client on my ESX 3.5 server. (BrightStor Client for Linux 11.5 Sp3)

I have modify Firewall configuration by autorise 6051 UDP and TCP port.

Auto-discover on my BrightStor Windows Server work fine and I can see all ESX File System and partitions.

I have define a new backup Job with Pre-Post script on ESX for VM Snappshots.

But sizing of partition is wrong (more than 1 terabyte !!!) I have only 300 Gb on my server and backup operation is very slow ( on VMFS)

Have you expereiment this kind of trouble ?

Regards

[MC-303]

It depends on the amount of vm’s you have and what kind of backup method you want to use.

If you want to do a vmdk backup this is not the way to go. It is slow because it is a network backup. Maybe you can look at vcb this is faster when you’re using fc.

How many vm’s do you have?

[gmoreau]

I'm using Virtual Server 1.04 on Windows Server (GSX) since on year (for test and sizing) and I have 5 VMs running on.

Each VM have is own native backup agent, and I stop all VM during host server backup !!

This is my fisrt ESX server and I have 2 VM's runing on : one for VirtualCenter and one for a CMS application server in test.

I need to migrate all VM runing on Virtual Server to my new ESX server ( Virtual converter : no problem for that opération).

For backuping I want to use native agent for a better backup/restor process, but I want to use native ESX backup agent for VMDK files backup to (in case of ESX crash).

But I seem that BrightStore Agent for Linux is not support for ESX 3.5.

Regards.

[kharbin]

Linux agents in the console are slow by design. Also, you are performing the backup in the service console, which by default only has about 272MB RAM and 300MHz of CPU. Again, this will cause the agent to run very slow. If you are going to use the agent in the SC, increase SC RAM to 800MB and CPU reservation to 1GHz or better. If still slow, try re-nicing the job with a -10. The increased priority will help.

Now we do come to network. If you agent is going to make full backups every night, then you will saturate your network (if multiple ESX hosts), as VMDKs are large, and the agent will continuously stream the data. Make sure you set it to use differentials if possible, as this will dramitically decrease network usage.

Also, have you benchmarked the network speed and LUN read speeds to see if there is a physical bottleneck somewhere?

my 2 cents

Ken Harbin

www.esXpress.com (VM backups made easy)

[MC-303]

Oke,

The best thing you can do is to install the arcserve agent within your vm and make a full backup like your physical servers. This is easiest way to do this.