Networker

[Networker] Backing up ISCSI LUNS

2009-09-09 19:06:50
Subject: [Networker] Backing up ISCSI LUNS
From: dfields <networker-forum AT BACKUPCENTRAL DOT COM>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 19:01:33 -0400
I just found out something interesting that I thought that everyone else would 
want to know.  First, my environment:  Backup server is Windows 2003 running 
Networker 7.4.4 with some hotfixes.  The linux client is 7.4.4 also.

We've been having a problem lately with backups either taking an extremely long 
time to run, or with the backup server crashing for no apparent reason.  Last 
night, I was watching the backups, and I think I finally figured out why. 

We use an Equallogic SAN, and I've created several LUN's that I'm mapping to 
some of our Linux Redhat servers.  On a couple of them, I've got a directory 
structure similar to the following:

/u00
/u00/work
/u00/staging

Where /u00, /u00/work, and /u00/staging are all ISCSI LUNs.  The last two LUNs 
are just mounted over top of directories in /u00 (and they are obviously 
mounted after /u00 is mounted).  This isn't too different than doing this with 
NFS mounts.

During backups, the client is backing up the server with a saveset of All, 
which works ok in that it backs up /u00, /u00/work, and /u00/staging as 
different save sets, which is what you would expect it to do.  But what it's 
not doing is skipping the "work" and "staging" directories when it's backing up 
the /u00 save set.  I think it's because the client doesn't know  that the work 
and staging directories are ISCSI mounts.  If these were NFS mount points, then 
they would be skipped as part of the backup of /u00.

I ran some reports after the backup finished, and the backup for /u00 was much 
larger than it should have been.  

I'm going to open up a ticket with EMC once I do some more testing and I can 
give them more information.  

Has anyone else seen this?  If so, how did you work around it?  Right now, the 
only way I can think of to do it is to create two different clients and use 
server side directives.  

Thanks,

Dave

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