Re: [Networker] Backing up ISCSI LUNS
2009-09-09 22:18:17
On 9/9/09 7:11 PM, Preston de Guise wrote:
On 10/09/2009, at 09:01 , dfields wrote:
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.
Opening a case with EMC on this would be a waste of time because
NetWorker is behaving as intended and as we'd expect.
iSCSI is effectively meant to be presented as local storage, in the same
way that a SAN/FC presented LUN should appear as local storage.
As such, NetWorker is doing the right thing - it wants to back it up.
To work around it - e.g., if you want to backup the LUN via the RedHat
host or in some other fashion, you need to setup directives to
skip/ignore those filesystems.
I'm going to disagree with Preston. Either, NetWorker should backup /u00 and not see /u00/work
and /u00/staging as separate savesets, or it should see them as separate savesets and not
backup /u00/work and /u00/staging as part of /u00 as well as separately.
You should definitely open an issue with EMC -- one piece or the other is wrong.
--
Frank Swasey | http://www.uvm.edu/~fcs
Sr Systems Administrator | Always remember: You are UNIQUE,
University of Vermont | just like everyone else.
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
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