No we don't do any type of snapshots here... We don't use VCB's, we just
backup the clients directly as an individual Networker client, as stated
earlier the "Virtual Client" license lets us just license the individual ESX
hosts and then the guests are "Free".
We've got an EMC Clarrion CX3-20 feeding one farm and an EMC Clarrion CX3-80
feeding another. We've got a density of around 35 VM's per host. We are
limited to 1gb of bandwidth to the CX3-20 farm and 2gb of bandwidth to the
CX3-80 farm. There are about 10 ESX servers in each Farm.
We only have a single networker server running on a Sun T5240 w/64gb of RAM,
writing to a 6 drive SL500 and a 97TB EDL.
Do you know where you're bottlenecking? We run 2-3 Physical/Virtual Tape
devices per HBA port so we can keep them saturated. Our SAN is horribly
oversubscribed (48 port cards) so we patched the VTL directly into the Sun
server on 4 HBA's.
I'm not a big fan of the whole VCB model due to the need for double the disk
and the 2 step single file recovery... we kept putting this issue off until
the virtual client licensing became available, then we went for cheap and
quick. To be honest I'm floored at how well ESX does actually handle the
backup jobs I/O wise. Our plan was to plunk down another mortgage on a
RecoverPoint or Avamar solution to handle the ESX farm, but the traditional
model seems to be working well enough.
In our environment the single file level recovery beats out the need for BMR
too... I mean really just make a new Windows guest from template, do a full
recovery using NetWorker, reboot, and bam the old guest is back < 20 minutes
usually.
Maybe you should try getting an eval license for some virtual clients and
bypass the VCB, see if it is better for your environment.
Alec
On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Venkat Tudi <venkat.tudi AT gmail DOT com>
wrote:
> Anacreo,
> We SANS VCB also here but when ever i start the backup VCB is doing a SNAP
> (Copying to local disk on VCB) and then doing a backup.
> Is this happening to you as well.
>
> During the VCB mounting VM's my storage node is pretty much unresponsive.
> Our server is 2 quad cores with 8 GB mem.
>
> Any input is helpful.
>
> -Venkat
>
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Anacreo <anacreo AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
>
>> We're using NW 7.5.1 and backing up about 200 VM's... (300 more to come
>> this month).
>>
>> We don't have much data under each VM and we've gone sans VCB and are very
>> happy with it.
>>
>> Buy a license for each VMWare ESX server as a virtual client connection,
>> install client under every VM, and dump them into a few groups... We're
>> only doing full's once a month, and have not experienced complaints. We
>> tried to group the VMWare clients by application so they are spread more
>> evenly across the farm.
>>
>> We are not getting backups of the actual vmdk today, but this hasn't been
>> seen as a significant issue in our environment, also eventually when CDP
>> is
>> brought in they'll get point in time snapshots.
>>
>> Alec
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Ken Gehring <ken.gehring AT gmail DOT com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > For NW7.4.4 (and I assume NW7.4.2
>> > You need to configure each ESX host and each ESX client.
>> > Each host will use 2 licenses and each client will be free (they use
>> > the second license for the host).
>> > You will need to install the networker client on each VM Instance.
>> >
>> > VCB is better supported in NW7.6 and that may be an option for you.
>> >
>> > Ken
>> >
>> > On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Venkat Tudi <venkat.tudi AT gmail DOT com>
>> > wrote:
>> > > Currently we are using VRANGER for backing up the VM instances uising
>> > VCB.
>> > > We want to eliminate VRANGER and use only Networker for our Backups.
>> > >
>> > > We are on 7.4.2
>> > >
>> > > Here are my questions.
>> > > Do I need to configure each client in the NW Server or Do I only
>> > configure
>> > > the ESX host in NWSERVER?
>> > > If I configure each VM instance in NW do I need to install the NW
>> client
>> > on
>> > > the each VM instance? There are thousands of the instances.
>> > >
>> > > To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu
>> > > and
>> > type "signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to
>> > networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with
>> this
>> > list. You can access the archives at
>> > http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
>> > > via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER
>> > >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
>> > temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
>> > --Benjamin Franklin
>> >
>> > To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu
>> > and
>> type
>> > "signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to
>> > networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with
>> this
>> > list. You can access the archives at
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>> > via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER
>> >
>>
>> To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and
>> type "signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to
>> networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Venkat Tudi
>
>
To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and
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