Nuts and Bolts in NetBackup for VMware
Looking for the details on NetBackup for VMware? Would you like to know about the nuts and bolts inside? We recently published, and we intend to publish more on technical details on award winning NetBackup for VMware protection. As there are many blogs in this series, I am publishing this blog as a container for this series.
The series so far:
Discovery job in VMware Intelligent Policy
Understanding V-Ray vision through backup process flow
Transport methods and TCP ports
Virtual Machine snapshots for backing up business critical applications
NetBackup 5220 and SLES based backup hosts
Do you prefer us to talk about something in this series on VMware protection? Add a comment to this blog and we will try to get that for you. No guarantees, but we will certainly try our level best!
About Netting Out NetBackup Blog
Our passion is protecting your data. Check out news and insights from the Symantec NetBackup team addressing datacenter issues like disaster recovery, deduplication, Windows application protection and continuous data protection.
Comments 7 Comments • Jump to latest comment
Hi Abdul,
Just wanted to say thank you for an excellent post. It's a shame the official Symantec documentation no longer appears to keep up with the functionality of the product. These posts have certainly helped explain the internal workings of the product.
Thank you Simon. Appreciate the feedback!
Warm regards,
Abdul "Rasheed" Rasheed
Tweet me @AbdulRasheed127
I was looking at Video the V-Ray technology and it stated Netbackup will no longer require VCB or Disk staging for VMware. What can you tell me about V-ray? We have Vendor came in to do the work for us. So far they told us our media server have to be Windows server in order it to be support vStorage API for VMware. We do not have any Netbackup appliance, can you tell me if this is true Netbackup is require Windows Server for vStorage API VMware backup ? I read some where and it stated Netbackup can support only SuSe Linux or Windows media to backup Vmware, then what is the meaninging for V-ray ? please explain
Audi - You can get more details by doing a google search V-ray and symantec or clicking this link. In short, V-Ray is a term that describes a collection of technologies that Symantec offers to give customers x-ray like visibility into their virtual environments. The additional visibility results in automation of protection, faster recovery, better deduplication, and a host of other capabilities.
Regarding your question about the vStorage API: The OS limitation is a factor of what VMware offers - Windows and Linux. Symantec is the only company to develop a full range of capabilities for both Windows and Linux versions of the API (to the best of my knowledge). And yes, the Linux version of the API is currently available in the appliance only.
The same author of this blog also wrote an additional series (see link below).
http://www.mrvray.com/netbackup-101-for-vmware-professionals/
Hello Abdul,
Congratulations for the wonderful topic! I could really understood how Netbackup and VMware backup work usually. I am trying to understand a problem that I had here, and it will contribute a lot.
In addition, I'd like to ask you, if you have any other topic where I can find explanation for my problem, or at least to make me more confident about comming backups around the world.
We have a central VCenter in Germany, that manage all sites around the world. However, some time ago, we had a complicated problem when Vmware backup started. For some reason, backup start, and some "bpfis" process keep running even after error 196.
So, I re-submitted all failure jobs, and some orphan process keep running together new ones.
The main problem on this case, is that Netbackup Masterserver keep trying connection with VCenter and my MPLS went down due to overused of network between Brazil and Germany.
Any idea what could be happen? Which process could use a lot of bandwidth during VMware backups?
After restart all Netbackup Services on Master Server, using "bpdown", "bpps" (kill remanning process) and "bpup", MPLS went up again.
Thank you very much in advance!
Hi Abdul,
Liking your articles especially the article on the VMware backup process!
Do you have any plans on also doing the same for the VMware restore process?
Many Thanks
Hello everybody.
UP. I'm also interested in such comprehensive papers on the VMWare restore subject.
Thanks in advance.
Gaëtan
Would you like to reply?
Login or Register to post your comment.