I am currently having a few teething problems getting my companies backup solution functioning correctly. We have a NetApp filer, which our 6 x ESX hosts access using QLogic Hardware iSCSI adapters.
We have a tape library which is fibre connected to both our filer and our backup server which has both VCB and Backup Exec installed. The intention is to backup the volume snapshots using NDMP.
I have downloaded a script from these forums which I have modified to be specific to our environment. This script appears to place the VM's on each VMFS datastore in 'hot backup' mode, then snapshots the NetApp volume, then releases the VM's - giving a consistent snapshot of the volumes.
I intend to execute the script as a pre-backup task as part of the job. Then backup the snapshots directly from the filer to the library.
Is this how other people are backing up NetApp filers? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Sean
We have a very similar environment, just switch BackupExec for ARCServe. We use Fibre for most everything, very little iSCSI, but Netapp SAN, Fibre attached Tape Library, etc.. is all the same. We aren't using the SAN snapshot, we are using VCB to do our backups. VCB will automatically create a snapshot of your VM's, allow them to be backed up, and then fold the snap back into the running VM. For our database servers we actually use the ARCServe oracle agents to back up the databases, as it was a lot easier than scripting the quiese commands, and some of our databases are test DB's, and don't run in archivelog mode, so we needed the agents.
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Changing to Arcserve is not an option for us, however Backup Exec 11D should function exactly the same. I have tested VCB over iSCSI and it appears to work pretty much as I expected, but we found that the backup server required enormous amounts of locally attached storage to handle the snapshot mounts for some of our very large servers.It my be an option we look into further if we are not able to effectivley utilise the NetApp snapshots.
Remember - this is the first version on VCB that supports iSCSI....
I wouldn't suggest changing to Arcserve, I doubt there are any real differences in the way they integrate with VCB. So far as the disk space issue, there is a way around that. I assume that you are doing FULLVM backups of your VM's, since file level windows backups don't take any extra space to mount. If you do a single backup job that mounts ALL VM's in one shot, then you need to have space available to copy down all of the files from the datastore locally (minus the unused space in the .vmdk's). If you split this single backup job into smaller groups of servers, or even individual servers, then you don't have to have that much storage space available. If you do individual jobs per server, you only would have to have enough space to temporarily store your largest VM. Also, make sure to shrink the vmdk's using whatever utility you wish, and defrag before that if possible, so that you have to copy the least amount of data.
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