Virtual Machine backup strategy

[albertwt]

Hello All,

How does one do the backup of their VMWare virtual infrastructure ?

I'm wondering if there is a backup best practice and deployment document that can describe which architecture to select (eg. NBD or SAN or D2D or D2T, etc..).

Thanks,

[tmcd35]

The VM's themselves a treated like regular servers and do standard Yearly/Monthly/Weekly/Daily full and incremental data backups to our 4Tb NAS box. This is onsite but in a remote building.

I then do a separate Easter/Christmas/Summer end-of-term full back-up. This is on to a portable 4Tb NAS that is taken home with me. All our VM hard drive images are manually copied over to this NAS. Clonezilla (Ghost) images are taken of servers that have not been virtualised yet.

I also do a separate daily NTBackup of the System State of the three DC's on to the onsite NAS. The latest of these backups is copied on to the portable NAS during the end-of-term backups.

[albertwt]

Hi There,

Thanks for the reply,
because my current one is very slow to backup all of the VM from the

SAN ---> ESXi servers ---> the network ---> Backup server
it took 22 hours to backup the whole lot, so it is practically fullvm backup every day with the VCB and Backup Exec 12.5 without rest :-o

I wonder if that is good way to do it ?

[tmcd35]

That sounds a little overkill. Either you are constantly over writing backups or you have some major storage space on the backup server/tape!

That said 22 hours sounds good to me for a full backup of everything. My three non-VM'd servers currently take around 12hours each to clone.

I don't use VCB or Backup Exec so I can't tell you the features of these products, I'm sure others can.

How ever I'd look at some of the following...

• Doing full VM backups once a month
• Does VCB/Backup Exec allow for Incremental/Bit change/snapshot backups? If so I'd do that on a daily/weekly basis between full backups. - Quicker and less space
• Does your license for Backup Exec allow you to install it on the VM's themselves? I'd do regular Full and Incremental backups from the actuall servers on a regular basis rather than backing up everything all the time. Again quicker and less disk space for the back ups.

I prefer D2D backups for speed. It's always good to have some form of off-site backup. As said I use a portable NAS. If you prefer light weight tapes for off-site then I'd look at D2D2T backups.

Your other option if you have money to burn is to look at SAN replication. If you can replicate the SAN in another building you can then take the full backups from there, it no longer matters how long the backups take to run through.

[DMcCoy]

When using VCB it is a good idea to occasionally run the shrink option from within VM tools. This will not shrink the disk on ESX, but will mark unused space as 0s to stop them being backed up by VCB.

The problem with VCB over traditional backup is it will do a read of the entire disk image, so can be quite a lot slower than a VM agent.

[albertwt]

To tmcd35,
Thanks for the sharing mate, i really appreciate it.
22 hours meaning that the backup yes overwritten in a matter of 2 days (as the expiring i set into 2 days).

To DMcCoy,
I did that already as the option in my BE 12.5, here it is the layout of my current network setup.

the purple arrow (which is the NBD mode backup to the backup server is running very2 slow around 243 MB/minutes according to the Backup Exec result log. (To backup 800 GB LUN it takes 55 hours.)

for the VM which has got RDM partition attach into it, i can just make it a virtual mode so that the VCB v1.5 can do the snapshot and quiesce the EXT3 Filesystem.

The reason in using the NBD mode to transfer the VM backup is that to make the backup process to run faster without encryption but it turns out to be slower that what i thought, if anyone got a better solution in using SAN mode or even HotAdd mode please share your comments and suggestion here.

Note: The network between iSCSI SAN andthe 2x ESXi servers are different subnet (see the color coding)
Blue cylinder indicates NTFS partition while the Black cylinder indicates the VMFS

[DMcCoy]

NBD is the slowest option, you could connect the Backup Exec box to the iscsi san with the Microsoft initiator instead. WARNING: If you do this then you must make some changes to the windows server first or it will damage the vmfs partitions. VMware: 10 steps to install VCB v1.5 | VMpros.nl

What sort of speed do you get via a Backup Exec agent inside the VM? If you are using the USB drive for D2D then that could be the bottleneck. Also make sure you keep backup to disk files at 2GB chunks as large backup to disk files start to become very slow.

[albertwt]

NBD is the slowest option, you could connect the Backup Exec box to the iscsi san with the Microsoft initiator instead. WARNING: If you do this then you must make some changes to the windows server first or it will damage the vmfs partitions. VMware: 10 steps to install VCB v1.5 | VMpros.nl

What sort of speed do you get via a Backup Exec agent inside the VM? If you are using the USB drive for D2D then that could be the bottleneck. Also make sure you keep backup to disk files at 2GB chunks as large backup to disk files start to become very slow.

Hi DMcCoy,

That is quite interesting article, by doing so the Backup server which is serving as the BE 12.5 Media server is sitting in two subnet (oneis Production LAN and the other is iSCSI).

and then expose the VMFS LUN to the backup server for -SAN mode backup instead of NBD ?
Correct me if I'm wrong ?

with my current design i tried -SAN mode it failed as my ESXi servers directly connected with the SAN.

thanks for the reply.

[Sandman]

There are loads of ways to do backups.

VDR comes with vSphere I believe.

esXpress has just been released in a new version which makes use of the new changed block tracking feature.

[Butuz]

Does esXpress support ESXi 4?

Butuz

[Sandman]

It currently doesn't support ESXi, however it is on the roadmap for future development.

[Butuz]

It's been on the roadmap for the future for a long time. When is the future going to become the present?

Butuz

[Sandman]

Ron Oglesby on Cloud Computing VMworld 2009

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlh4nUTm3bk"]YouTube - Ron Oglesby on Cloud Computing VMworld 2009[/ame]