Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
1 Message
0
5178
July 2nd, 2009 06:00
What is the best practice to create backups of our environment?
Components involved
VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise (with consolidated backup)
EqualLogic PS5000
Dell TL2000 with iSCSI interface
Microsoft Data Protection Manager
-------------------------------------------------------
Currently we are running several virtual Microsoft servers on vSphere 4 (file, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint ,etc)
To create backups of our data DPM agents are installed on each windows host. DPM creates VSS snapshots of the data so (e.g. Exchange data) is consistent.
We noticed that during the backup to tape (daily) the data stream from the protected server to the DPM server runs over the LAN. Is it possible to do this over the dedicated iSCSI network and create short term backups on disk (EqualLogic volume) and long term on tape?
Are there other ways to backup the data? e.g. create a SAN based snapshot (EqualLogic Auto-snapshot manager, CLI) and backup this snapshot with DPM?
Also we want to create backups from the snapshots of the VMware machines. Should we do this with EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot manager VMware edition? With this it is possible to create SAN based snapshots, but then what is the best way to put this on tape for long term protection?
And can VMware Consolidated Backup help me in this matter or shall I leave it to Auto-Snapshot manager VMware edition because of the SAN based snapshot functionality?
So a lot of technologies and questions, but how to combine them to come to the best possible backup and restore strategy.
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
July 2nd, 2009 07:00
SAN based snapshots aren't backups; if your production volume were to corrupt or fail (e.g. double drive failure before a hotspare can finish rebuilding), your snapshot is useless as well.
SAN based snapshots are just like VMware virtual machine snapshots; they only store changes; so if you lose the original (file/blocks-of-data-that-make-up-the-volume), you're missing a part of your volume, so you effectively have nothing (useful).
You can present a snapshot to a backup server and assuming it can interpret the filesystem, it could back it up. However, unless you use RDM, the filesystem is VMFS, which a Windows or Linux backup server won't be able to read, so it cannot back it up.
One option to offload your backups to your iSCSI network is to buy VCB (if you don't already have this), and let a Windows VCB proxy do your backups. You can also give this proxy it's own volume for staging (back up to a disk (Equallogic volume) first, and afterwards back that up to tape).