VMware backup

Best backup solution for VMware (imo of course)

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html

Is the 1200 being used for production and backup data? Seems like a bad idea if so.. Veeam would definitely be my choice for any fully virtualized infrastructure. Bear in mind you must be running a paid for version of VSphere for Veeam to work. Veeam also does replication so if you could put another copy of VSphere on that 520 server you could potentially have replicas running to it. You could use backup copy jobs to get data off to another location be it a NAS, tape or off to the cloud with Veeam Cloud Connect. I do a lot of work with Veeam so happy to answer any questions.

It generally comes down to what is an acceptable risk. If the 1200 is unavailable when the 3420 goes down what would be the plan if there is a disaster. Once you have an additional copy of your backups then the risk decreases. A lot of backup vendors talk a lot about the 3 2 1 rule. Have at least 3 copies of data, store your copies of data on at least two media, and keep at least one copy offsite.

Production data counts as one copy of data, backup to your 1200 could be your second and a tape copy your third. This meets the two different media rule and the one copy offsite also. All can be done with Veeam, i would suggest looking at the Enterprise licence rather than Standard licence if you do look at Veeam as there is a lot of good stuff not in Standard. Especially around SQL and tape. It's licenced per socket of the hosts that are being backed up.

Disclaimer here. I do work for an MSP that sells Veeam but am purely technical and have tested many different backup products.

Is it on a Windows server? If so, Oracle 11g has a vss writer so Veeam can back it up cleanly. If it is running on Linux you would need to have a pre and post run scripts set up.

No worries at all. Just one thing to bear in mind that the Veeam proxy server will need to be able to reach the network card of any virtual machines that are being backed up in an application aware state such as SQL, Exchange, Oracle, AD. This is because it installs a temporary agent during the backup when application aware processing is enabled. For machines that don't have applications that need to be quiesced then it doesn't need to use an agent at all.

jamesd wrote: »

To be able to backup/ restore a file (s) does it need an agent ?

No need for an agent there at all.

It uses the vss writer for Oracle once it is enabled. You can enable it in Oracle 11g and upwards i believe. There is a free trial for Veeam you can download a try if you want to give it a go.

Yep works really well. Let me know if you have any questions and i can try help out. Just got my VMCE in Veeam last week so it's all fresh in my head at the moment!

You should see all the media loaded in the library when you run an inventory. They may be in the Unrecognised Media Pool. If you only see the tape drive itself it is most likely a driver issue. You need the dell driver for the tape library and tape drive. If it shows as Unrecognised Media Changer in device manager it won't work. Veeam doesn't have its own drivers for the library itself.

jamesd wrote: »

Back again I have the 30 day Veeam trial loaded onto the 3 servers (3 Sites), each server's back to disk is going fine and no issues but I am confused with the tape options.

I have a 9 tape libary (Dell TL1000) and I got Veeam to see it and it can backup to the tape in the drive bay but I dont see how I can use the other tapes, I would like to do a full VM backup to tape nightly, eject that tape from the drive bay back into the library and for another tape to load into the drive bay.

Ah i see. When you set up a tape job for the first time it should ask you to set up a Media Pool. The job will take tapes that are associated with the media pool to run the job.

The media pool will dictate what retention the tapes will have. By default it will add media from the free media pool into the created media pool as required.

As you add tapes to the library you need to ensure they are put into the free media pool which will then allow the various created media pools to use them.

There is an eject option in the job which will for a tape library eject the tape an put it back into a library slot.

If you want to ensure a full backup is sent to tape there are a couple of ways of doing it. If you are using Reverse Incremental Mode for your backup you can set the tape job to not process incrementals set the schedule for whenever you need. As the only full on disk is the most up to date you will have a copy of the latest full on tape. If you are not using Reverse Incremental as the backup type to disk you can take advantage of a new feature called Virtual Synthetic to Tape. To do this you need to :
1. Disable process incrementals
2. Set the full backup schedule to be the same day as the tape job will run (On the same page as process fulls/process incrementals)

What will happen is that when the tape job runs it sees that it is due to create a new full that same day. It will then create a small file on disk which contains pointers to all the blocks of data it needs to create a full. It then creates a synthetic full onto tape without having to create a new full on disk, Very clever stuff altogether.

Hope all that makes sense?

jamesd wrote: »

It see's all the tapes ( 1 to 9) in the library with no issue, I am really wondering about how can I tell it or the loader what tape to use on which night.

It's one way to do it but i would suggest simplifying it a little.

Create one Media Pool called Daily Media Pool with a retention of 1 week. Create a second Media Pool called Weekly Media Pool with a retention of 1 month.

Create two backup to tape jobs. One going to the Daily Pool and the other to the Weekly Pool.

When you add new media just add it to the Free Media pool and Veeam will work out the rest and will take tapes as they come out of retention or from the Free Media.

I would strongly suggest getting your hands on some barcodes for the tapes. This way you don't need to worry about manually labelling tapes Monday, Tuesday etc. Veeam will just use whatever tapes are in the pool and you will be easily be able to track them based on the barcode being the same in Veeam as it is physically. You can usually pick barcodes up for 100 euro or less for a pack of 100 of them. It really takes a lot of the admin work out of tapes and means you can load up a bunch of tapes and let the software keep track of them.


Backups will be overwritten on the tape once the retention period is expired and a backup runs to it.
You want to leave CBT on. It allows for Veeam to only have to read blocks of data that has changed rather than having to read the whole VM.
Leave Eject tape ticked.
You should deselect Use Hardware Compressions as you are already backing up a compressed file and you will most likely see a performance drop if you have it enabled. You will not get any further compression out of the tapes so the true size of the tapes is the 2.5TB.