Incase anyone is considering implementing any ZFS in their environment which they want to back up using NetBackup we found out yesterday that ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES as the backup selection does NOT cover ZFS filesystems. 

 

We have a number of Sun boxes which have various test and development oracle instances which are housed inside ZFS file systems.  We blew away one of these test instances the other day (after doing a full OS backup and the required RMAN backups) but when we went to restore the data from the ZFS filesystems, NBU didn’t have anything under the uppermost directory.  A quick check of other systems with ZFS showed the same issue.We spent the better part of 2 days playing around with the include_list’s and exclude_list’s but nothing worked.

 

In order to backup ZFS file systems you must explicitly add the ZFS directories into the backup selections of the backup policy.  This “fix” was also confirmed by Symantec support who were also happy to tell me that ZFS isn’t officially supported by NBU yet.

 

This on its own should work great if you have a single policy backing up a single server with all it’s ZFS under the same parent directory.  However, if like us, you have a backup policy which backs up multiple servers, each with their own uniquely named ZFS file systems, you need to get a bit creative. 

 

The policy in question backs up 15 Sun boxes  with a total of 6 differently named ZFS file systems spread amongst them.  If you just list the file systems in the backup selections, NBU looks for each of those different filesystems on each server and spits out an error code 71 (None of the files in the file list exist) for every directory it can’t find.  The only way we could work out to avoid these errors (and there were a lot of them) was to create every missing directory on every server and then touch a tiny file inside each of these directories.  Now when the policy runs, it sees each directory (as listed in the backup selection) on each server and doesn’t moan about anything.  Perhaps not the neatest of fixes but it works.

 

Apologies for the wordy post, just thought I’d put this info out there in case anyone else is moving towards ZFS.

 

Mark Glazerman

Enterprise Storage Administrator

Spartech Corporation

Desk: 314-889-8282

Fax: 314-854-8282

Cell: 618-520-3401

mark.glazerman AT spartech DOT com

http://www.spartech.com

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