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979
October 16th, 2013 09:00
VMWare Backup and Restore Options
Hello,
I'm trying to understand what the best supported option for our environment would be. We are working with Avamar 6.1.
Basically, we have a client who has a vSphere environment as well as an Avamar grid. We are looking to be able to backup each virtual machine, replicate their grid to our's, and be able to restore to a VM in a vSphere environment on our side.
In order to accomplish this, I understand that I should only need an Avamar Proxy machine in their vSphere environment, and I would be able to restore the data as a file system level restore to our vSphere environment once the data is replicated to us (and I shouldn't need a proxy on our side, correct?).
My main question here is, would there be a way to backup their virtual machines as an image-level backup (like just the .vmdk file), replicate this, and then do an image level restore to vSphere on our side? (Bypassing the extra steps involved with file system restore like building the machine OS, registering the new VM with Avamar, etc). From what I have been reading, by using the Avamar Proxy method, we are not able to do image-level restores.
I found an article on VMWare VDP that might be able to accomplish this:
What’s New with vSphere Data Protection (VDP) 5.5 | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs
Is there a supported method through Avamar that allows image-level restores of backed-up vSphere virtual machines?
Any recommendations are welcome!
Thanks!
Josiah
J_H_
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498 Posts
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October 21st, 2013 14:00
Let me try to explain this best I can as an end user who has had to learn all this the hard way.
1) you need a proxy - when you do a vmbackup it maks a snapshot - and is backing it up at the vmdk level (if you are doing a VM backup - meaning your domain is v-machines and you got the names from vcenter- and no avamar software was installed on the vm client) . I admit I am not 100% sure on the need for a proxy to clone it from the vmdk backup.
I have cloned a few servers using this vm backup, you just restore to a machine with a new name (be sure to tell it NOT to power on, so you can change the and name before you do)
2) to do a FLR (first you must verify that it has supported file systems - I have a few windows vm that do not,.... and none of my Linux vm's are support for a FLR - File Level Restore). so for the FLR it mounts it on a proxy so you can then browse the file systems..... but there are some issues with this. the VM FLR was intenedto only do a small restore about 10mb a few files.... anything over that it will not work. (believe me I have tried)
a) I have had to work this in two ways - one make a complete clone get a new ip , up the server let them get what they want.
b) do a partial clone... by this I mean we have a blank vm we call AvamarRestore... we only restore the one drive we need to this blank VM, we do not power it on. Once the restore is done we then cross mount that drive from AvamarRestore to the original server as say drive F, the user is informed of what it is and they can then drag and drop or copy everything they need to the original drives. I then remove the extra drive and then clean out the AvamarRestore vm so it is blank again. I have had to do this many many times. There is no way you can restore a whole drive using FLR for a vm.
See the VMware Guide - and section on Backup and restore - it shows the different ways to do restores.
JosiahE
12 Posts
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October 22nd, 2013 08:00
J.H.,
Thanks for the reply! I think this makes things a little more clear. I have a production and lab vsphere environment, so I will try spinning up a proxy and testing between the two.
Thanks again!
Josiah