Backing up RDM / VMFS volumes - incrementals

Jay Son's picture
Jay Son
November 5th, 2009

NBU 6.5.4
OS = AIX 6
3 UNIX media server incl. master server
2 Windows media servers
10 (LTO3) drives allocated for our Filers - fiber connected

With VMWare on the rise, I've been backing up RDM and VMFS volumes with FULL backups only. Mainly, I come in AFTER the volume on our filers has taken a snapshot of the VMWare clusters  We have a script (for NBU) that will append/add the list of volumes to our policy (Backup Selection List). My concern is that our LTO tapes are being "eaten" up by these backups because we do complete FULL backups daily. Whereas, when these virtual machines/servers were once physical machines, which ALLOWED me to take INCREMENTAL backups, resulting in fewer tapes utilized. We're finding ourselves scrounging to look for scratches, weekly (sometimes daily). Ultimately I want to stay with tapes.

My questions are:

What is your recommendation (best-in-class) approach to relieve us from backing up FULLS daily? Put incremental back in play (if possible).
What are other large businesses practicing in their VM backup environment?
Are there products that can eliminate daily fulls and inject incrementals from our NetApp (filer) snapshots?

Any feedback to this discussion is helpful.

Thank you
Jay Son 

Policy Type: NDMP

Here is a copy of my Backup Selection List:

- /vol/vmware_cluster1_dsgroup2/.snapshot/smvi_backup_Cluster-Prod01-DS2-Daily_20091105044500_26f31053-6bcb-4da5-a0db-547426b0c1c9_Cluster-Prod01-DS2
- /vol/vmware_cluster1_dsgroup1/.snapshot/smvi_backup_Cluster-Prod01-DS1-New-Daily_20091105040000_a7a95d79-e7b8-4e47-ae7a-08f23840eda8_Cluster-Prod01-DS1-New

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Dimitris Peppas's picture
Dimitris Peppas
2 weeks 5 days ago

What is your recommendation

  • What is your recommendation (best-in-class) approach to relieve us from backing up FULLS daily? Put incremental back in play (if possible).

VMWare now supports VCB backups of RMD volumes if they are in virtual mode. The use of Flashbackup-windows type policies allow for full and incremental backups. The down -side is that you need a VCB Proxie (or a few depending on your VM infrastructure) with enough capacity to copy the volume over the SAN. But you can buy some quick SAS hdd's and save storage from the NetApp FS.
The good thing is that with the Full backups, you can also do full image restore. With Incrementals you cannot.

  • What are other large businesses practicing in their VM backup environment?

VCB is quite good, and Duredisk is also catching up. Actually PD is said to be very strong on VM environments (Optimized deduplication for VMware off-host backups of vmdk (image) files / http://www.symantec.com/business/products/newfeatures.jsp?pcid=pcat_business_cont&pvid=1381_1 )




BR,
DP
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