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Netting Out NetBackup

Showing posts tagged with NetBackup for VMware
Showing posts in English
Day and Night: NetBackup 5220 vs. that other product
AbdulRasheed | 26 Feb 2013 | 0 comments

  I have worked for NetBackup Technical Support as a Staff engineer for long time. Customers don’t call us when things are working great; they need our help when they are not getting what they want from the product. Naturally, a seasoned engineer in support is continuously dealing with weaknesses or defects in the product more than its strengths.

  Recently, I watched a demo of protecting virtual machines using a competitor’s product. This product’s primary backup server (equivalent to a NetBackup master server) runs only on Windows. The product installation setup screen reminded me of Windows 3.1 installation back in 90s during my high school days. What a nostalgic feeling! It prompts the user for a few inputs, goes and copies a few files, comes back and asks a few other questions, then it does something else and so on. It also prompted for reboots a couple of times. The partner consultant who was installing the software pretty much had to baby-...

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Nuts and Bolts in NetBackup for VMware
AbdulRasheed | 22 Jan 2013 | 7 comments

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

...

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Nuts and Bolts in NetBackup for VMware: Handling Orphaned Snapshots
AbdulRasheed | 22 Jan 2013 | 20 comments

Recently, one of our customers asked me if NetBackup for VMware supports the use of a dedicated data store for snapshots. That triggered this blog.

  Snapshot is great. Among many of its uses, NetBackup employs it to create a consistent point-in-time image of the virtual machine for the purpose of backup. When a snapshot is active, the writes to VMDK files are directed redo logs. At the end of the backup, the snapshot is released and redo log is played back into VMDK.

  The world is less than ideal. What happens if a backup ends prematurely and the snapshot is left behind? Now the redo log grows. What if such situations arise frequently? Now you have multiple redo logs growing in the data store. There are two major issues here.

  1. The storage space on data store gets used up quickly, if the data store fills up all the VMs using that data store would be affected
  2. The more snapshots you have for the same virtual...
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VMware Protection using NetBackup Appliances: A Technical Deep Dive
AbdulRasheed | 20 Mar 2013 | 6 comments

Note: Please click here for a recent and updated version of this webcast

As more and more of your business critical applications get virtualized, your data protection solution needs to step up to the plate. You are likely to have a hybrid environment and your data protection solution should have the visibility into what is inside both virtual and physical systems. Processor intensive blind deduplication of VMDK files will not scale as your environment grows. Above all, the solution also needs to protect vCenter server, the backbone of vMotion, DRS, HA and more.

We provided a technical deep dive on NetBackup for VMware and how this award winning data protection solution can be quickly deployed for protecting everything in your data center in a matter of minutes. Powered by V-Ray and Intelligent...

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Nuts and bolts in NetBackup for VMware: Understanding V-Ray vision through backup process flow
AbdulRasheed | 22 Jan 2013 | 13 comments

Now that we know how VM discovery job works for a VMware Intelligent Policy (VIP), let us move on to the actual backup job. The process flow described here is the same for both VIP and browse-and-select type policies unless specified otherwise.

As we did in the previous blog, let us assume that the NetBackup master server, media server and VMware backup host are three different systems.

  1. NetBackup Policy Execution Manager (nbpem) triggers a backup job once the policy, schedule, virtual machine combination is due and backup window is open. It works in conjunction with NetBackup Job Manager (nbjm), NetBackup Resource Broker (nbrb) and NetBackup Enterprise Media Manager (nbemm) to identify the resources (media server, storage unit etc.) for backup. This resource identification process is well detailed in NetBackup Documentation,...
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