New to TSM for Virtual Environments

[rowl]

I am currently looking at options for backing up a large VMWare environment and have started looking into the TSM for VE solution. Reading over the user guide raises some questions that I hope someone here can clear up for me. Our VMWare environment is 90% Windows, some Linux, and all using SAN storage.

- There is a an off-host backup/restore system described in this manual, but I have not seen any sizing recommendations. I am looking to backup a VMWare ESX environment with 5000+ guest VM's with more on the way. I know my mileage will vary based on the nature of these clients, but has anyone found or know some ball park planning numbers for how many backup proxy hosts one would need? Or better yet, how one comes up with a number based on knowledge of the guests.

- I see that the backup proxy needs to have access to all of the storage volumes in the VMWare farm. Can one (should one?) run TSM Server on the same system as the backup proxy? It would be nice to avoid traversing the LAN with these backups if that is a supported option.

- Some of these VMs will be running MS SQL which we use a non-TSM solution to backup. I don't see any include/exclude options mentioned in the documentation. Is there any way to avoid backing up any portions of a guest that are not needed? Maybe excluding specific .vmdk files?

- I see there is a Pancetera Unite forum here but no posts in it. Can anyone say if Pancetera Unite offers anything above and beyond what TSM for Virtual Environments does? Most if what I see on Pancetera is from 10 or months back which I believe is prior to the TSM for VE release.

Thanks,
-Rowl

 

[moon-buddy]

I will answer you tomorrow or Monday - I did a lot of benchmarks and tests.

 

[moon-buddy]

OK - so you have quite a bit of VM Ware partitions to backup. This is no easy task to do from a scheduling viewpoint and from a DR scenario.

By the way, before I start writing what I think is the best approach, do not install the VM Ware proxy alongside your TSM Server. Also the versions for the proxy should be at TSM for VE at 6.2 and BA client at 6.2.3.3 (there was a bug at 6.2.3.1).

At 5000+ guest partitions I suggest having 1 proxy server per 500-600 guest partitions. Using an inline proxy server - the one that is part of a VM Ware environment - may not cut it. The problem with this setup is that you cannot have direct access to the SAN environment that the VM Ware server is accessing. LAN Free backup is suggested to allow fast backup and restore which can only be achieved by using an external proxy server.

Question: how is your ESX environment setup? Are these clustered to allow guest to fail over to any server? If these are not setup for fail over, then backup scheduling would be easier as you can define backup by ESX server host. Having a fail over setup, I found that it would be in my best interest to backup by VM Ware guest.

Another issue to tackle is restores. If you intend to use TSM for VE doing File level restores, consider how often you need to do incrementals and fulls. Remember that you cannot do incremental forever - you need to do regular fulls every now and then. This is a scheduling nightmare for 5000+ guests and not to mention if you can meet defined backup window times.

One thing you need to consider is having more than one TSM server to handle this many guest servers. Also consider having a huge number of tape drives that can be dedicated for LAN Free backups. In other words, you need to do a lot of calculations and schedule balancing to get your desired performance and schedules.

Good luck.

 

[rowl]

Thank you for the information, this is quite helpful. Sounds like this should be fun to work out all the details. These guests are currently backed up with an in-guest TSM client. This is working, but the VMWare team has expressed concerns about the load this puts on their environment. We are in the process of moving to DataDomain for TSM pool storage (nfs not VTL), this is why I was hopeful I could run the TSM server on the backup proxy to avoid traversing the network twice with the backup traffic.
-Rowl

 

[Masonit]

Does inline proxy server mean that you are using a vm as proxy server on the esx server / datacenter that you want to backup? If so how is the data transferred? Is it sent over the lan between the virtual center and proxy server?

Also is it possible to exclude vm that are powered off? If you specify to backup a vmhost it backup all vm. Even those who are turned off!??

\Masonit

 

[moon-buddy]

Yes - in inline, the proxy is a guest partition in one of the ESXi servers. And, yes, image backup is via LAN - which is slow.

You can exclude the proxy (and those turned off) from being backed up via an entry in the opt file: DOMAIN.VMFULL "-VM=proxy_name,off_vmguest1,off_vm_guest2"

 

[taskar]

We have a clustered environment to allow guest to fail over to any server in cluster. 6 hosts, 400vm. It becomes a problem to do vm backup by host/exi. Does anyone have some examples on how they handle backup? Heard about Scripts (but havent seen any examples) inhouse proxy etc? any suggestions on our environment, how to handle backup schedule?

 

[jan143us]

Did you look at the backup by folder option

 

[taskar]

Yes, we have been using the folder-options for a week now, and I think that is the way to go. Is there any preformance issues when the inhouse proxy on host A, backup up a vm that runs in host B? Are you guys using dedicated lan/nettwork adapters to take care of possible bandwith problem?

 

[yuki]

Hi,

If you like to perform real lanfree backups with TSM for VE, you should present VMware Datastores to physical proxy server (yes, like in old days with coonsolidated backup, and no, you don't have to install it ) and for that use LanFree client.

And for tape mounts, one VM one mount. And with this, proxy is not in it's performance limits.
So, you can define several TSM proxy servers to one physical server and backup parallel several VMs.

 

[walkman]

hi, thanks to who are create this post.. its very helpfull. i have plan to backup vmware image using tsm. we have about 100 virtual and 5 ESXi 4.1 server. this is my first expirience to implement backup for vmware. from what i have find is ESXi does not support for tsm 6.2 BA client. so i need to create one proxy server as a proxy to backup vmware image, that means ESXi server will run the image backup and place the image on the vmfs. after that TSM will backup the image to the ESXi (vmfs) server using proxy server. what i have plan is use the windows 2008 as a proxy server. before that proxy server must have connection to the ESXi server (LAN).

1)the problem is how the proxy server(windows) to backup the image on ESXi server at /vmfs?

 

[terlisimo]

so i need to create one proxy server as a proxy to backup vmware image, that means ESXi server will run the image backup and place the image on the vmfs. after that TSM will backup the image to the ESXi (vmfs) server using proxy server.

Not exactly... that's how it was done with the old VCB method. The new vStorage method does not need staging area for the backup image on the proxy server. Requirements for this are TSM 6.2 and ESX 4.0 or newer.

This new backup method reads data via network from the ESXi server's VMFS using VMware vStorage API and sends it immediately to the TSM server, without requiring any disk space for a local image copy. You just need network connections from your proxy to TSM and ESX servers.

Simply install the newest BA client on your proxy server, use custom install and select "vmware backup tools". After installing configure the BA client to use the vStorage API instead of the default VCB method, point it to your ESX or vCenter servers and you're set!

 

[walkman]

hi terlisimo,
thanks for your reply. how to point from proxy server to ESXi server?

thanks for advance.

 

[walkman]

hi..
i got the solution to backup vm ware. i have create one proxy server and i can backup the vmware image.

but i have problem when i try to restore the image. from what i understand to restore the vmware image is just open the BA GUI > action > restore vm. from that part just select the image and restore. and one more thing select to restore to original location or other location.

i have try and i works, but it's to slow.. the image size is 30GB. transfer rate during restore is 1GB/hour. thats mean i need about 30 hours to complete restore. After that i have try to restore regular file just take 1 minutes for 1GB.

so i realy need help to solve this problem. please.....

 

[skentzle]

Hi walkman,

how do you backup you environment? Is the proxy a virtual machine?
I use a physical machine as proxy node. The proxy is attached to san and has access to all vmware lun's. I installed the storage agent to proxy to backup vm image lanfree to vtl or tape.
This configuration allows to backup vm with a transfer rate of 100-300MB/s. Restore transfer rate is 80-200MB/s. If you need any configuration details please let me know.
Do you need only full vm backups/restores? If you need file level restore from vm image or instant restore, tsm ve is the best solution.