Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] VM backups

2012-03-13 09:32:07
Subject: [Veritas-bu] VM backups
From: tsimerson <nbu-forum AT backupcentral DOT com>
To: VERITAS-BU AT MAILMAN.ENG.AUBURN DOT EDU
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:32:04 -0700
- Should I look at Symantec?s solution?  Is there something better out there 
(VEEM?)
The VMware backup mechanism in NetBackup is very good.  The niche products like 
Veeam and vRanger are also good products but you have one major disadvantage:  
they support only VMware backups.  And, most implementations of these products 
rely on another product like NetBackup to handle really long term retentions 
(i.e, tape backups).  Don't get me wrong, Veeam and vRanger are both great 
products for VMware backups.

- I will need to do single file restores, not just system restores, can 
Symantec handle that with an all Linux environment?
It can as long as your Linux systems are running ext3 formatted file systems.  
I believe with NBU 7.5, it supports ext4.  I don't know how Veeam handles Linux 
VMs.

- How do most people do this and how are the results?
I've worked at a location that used vRanger to backup the VMs to a NAS storage 
device and then used NetBackup to back up to tape for offsite.  The down sides 
were the large amount of disk space required for the vRanger backups and the 
fact that it was a two step restore process.  I moved to the reseller side and 
most of my customers now  are implementing the NetBackup VMware solution.  In 
most cases, it is working just fine.

Since you have NetBackup, another method for backing up your VMs is to install 
the NetBackup agent in each VM and leverage client-side dedupe.  This works 
well because only your initial backup will stream the entire contents of the 
VM.  From that point forward, only the changed data is actually sent from the 
client.  This reduces the load tremendously on your ESX hosts.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when backing up at the VM image 
level:
- RDM (raw disk mapping) is not handled well by any of these products
- No exclusion capabilities
- No guarantee of application consistency especially in the case of databases.  
Best method for these would be to leverage the NetBackup agents.

Please keep in mind these are generalizations about the methods.  Your mileage 
may vary with the different products  [Wink] [/img]

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