On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 10:04:14AM -0400, ChrisCosta AT tdwaterhouse DOT com 
wrote:
> We are rolling out a large VMWARE project within out QA environment. Here is
> a basic configuration of the new environment. There are going to be three
> large "Wintel" servers running Windows 2000, on each of the three servers
> will be running approximately 40 virtual VMWARE sessions. These three
> "Wintel" servers will have multiple HBA attached to a SAN Storage
> environment (Hitachi Series 9900) and will be engaged in LUN sharing.
>  
> I am not trying to validate the configuration of the environment, what I am
> trying to do is understand how I will backup these three servers. I am
> assuming I will have to have the base Netbackup 4.5FP5 clients software for
> the Windows 2000 OS and a NetBackup 4.5FP5 Linux agent on the servers to
> backup the VMWARE sessions? I am making the correct assumption? And if so,
> will there be any special configuration setting I will need to make?

I haven't run VMware in several years, but I assume the overall design
hasn't changed.  Essentially you have a normal Linux file system plus a
few large container files for your Windows virtual machines.  I assume
that you would want to restore individual files for your Windows systems
and not an all or nothing approach.

You would need a Linux Netbackup client to do the backups of your
overall system.  This will take care of things like the VMware software
itself and the normal configuration files.

In your Linux NBU config, you'll want to exclude the container files
since backing them from Linux won't really do you a lot of good.

You would then put a NBU client on each of the Windows virtual machines.
Treat them like you would any other Windows host in your environment.
They would get backed up and restored the same way.

How Veritas licenses this type of ocnfiguration is beyond me.  I don't
know if you need 1 client or 40 per box.  If they try to nail you for
40, you may want to investigate another approach.  You could, for
example, get Linux to mount the Windows virtual machine as a share and
back it up that way but that makes your restores more complex.

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org