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April 22nd, 2011 13:00
change block tracking (CBT) and avamar 5 working on file level backup ?
First off all I would like to say that I am a vmware administrator - I do know my way around avamar but we have a team here at my company that's take care of backup for us.
I would like to implement CBT on my vmware environement and so I just implemented this vmware KB (#1020128) consisting of changing the vmx file of a VM to leverage change block tracking.
Since we only do file level backup with avamar (avamar agent inside the VM), my questions are:
1-Does avamar use CBT on file level backup ?
2-Is there any kind of modifications on the avamar server side to enable CBT for a file level backup ?
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leer-emn
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April 25th, 2011 14:00
So the short answer is yes, but you've got to change your way of thinking. I would recommend sitting down with your Avamar administrator and possibly EMC to discuss this.
I don't have the Avamar GUI in front of me, but you essentially uninstall all the software from the VMs (or disable those backups). You log in to the Avamar node and add a new server (client) pointing to your vCenter server. You also have to spin up some virtual appliances to do the backups. These are simply power on and give an IP address. Then in the Avamar GUI, you tell it what datastores this host can see. There is an EMC PDF on these instructions, I believe you can open a support case to get it. It might also be in the Avamar users guide, available on your management node.
Now, to do a full system restore, you simply log in to the Avamar GUI, select the client, and select restore. To do file level restores requires more work than above, as you have to spin up a windows VM to act as a file level restore proxy, and you have to turn on AxionFS on your Avamar node, which I believe support or Professional Services has to do for you. I've seen the instructions and it's not for the faint of heart.
You have to understand, to do CBT you have to do it at the VMWare host level. Basically what happens is the VM gets a snapshot taken, that snapshot is mounted read only to the backup proxy (the virtual appliance), and when the backup is complete the snapshot is deleted. So the proxies show up in the Avamar GUI, you tell it what datastores it has access to. Then you can add the VMs on those datastores as VMWare backup clients.
I have only tested this in a lab environment, to be honest I find the restore options to be limited under Avamar 5, and we our very large vCenter environment, I wasn't able to get Restore to a New VM working. With Avamar 6 (release has been announced but is not GA yet), this integration is supposed to be much more streamlined.