Sun Storage 7110 Backup Options

[RobFuller]

Well at the moment were using Hyper-V (yuck!) and backup is not easy with that using script the aVHD file add extra complication. I'm in the middle of testing XenServer at the moment which I have been very impressed with until today when the centre manager won't connect to a server for some reason.

 

But the problem with Xen is there are not many companies supporting backup for this so trying to work out an export script. I really want to backup these machines live without downtime as we have remote access 24/7 basically! That’s why NDMP looked a good option to backup the entire unit and do the snapshot in one swoop! But just getting backup exec to talk nicely! Phil is seeing if he has any clients using this setup who might have some pointers!

[Duke]

I've been testing Hyper-V, Xen and ESX for a while (see HERE) and after initially really liking Xen I'm now leaning towards VMware ESX. It's more of an enterprise-level product in some ways, and you do get things like the officially supported backup API. Once you account in the support costs I actually found Xen and ESX were fairly similar in price.

 

Cheers,

Chris

[RobFuller]

If I was paying then VMware without a doubt used it before the full version and it’s amazing. Problem is all the decent features are missing from the free version. Hence the next best thing is Xen as Hyper-V is so far behind its untrue..

[Duke]

I think Xen is the best free option and ESX is the best paid-for option too. Based on my experiences Hyper-V is just an absolute pain, although they might sort it out eventually. Any chance of you getting the budget to buy VMware?

[RobFuller]

Not this year but I need to get some virtual infrastructure going as we will be building our learning gateway in the summer.

[cookie_monster]

Did anyone get anywhere with getting backup exec to connect to and backup the 7110, i'd like to be able to backup the VM's and data direct from the SAN rather than having to backup data through shares and manually backing up the VM's during downtime.

 

Cheers.

[RobFuller]

I'm afraid I've not had time to really investigate this what’s causing the problems i hit a bit of a dead end, I'm with you cookie_monster this does seem the best way to backup if it worked!

I did email Phil (SUN) directly and asked for some help, he was going to get back to me as he was asking some of his customers which have this setup!

 

I will give him a poke and see if I can get him to reply to this thread.

[Duke]

Did anyone get anywhere with getting backup exec to connect to and backup the 7110, i'd like to be able to backup the VM's and data direct from the SAN rather than having to backup data through shares and manually backing up the VM's during downtime.

 

Only what I put in my last few posts. I was under the impression you wouldn't get a reliable backup from a running VM, at least not without using so the VMware Backup APIs which is what the Backup Exec Agent for VMware (not cheap) is for. Using them gets a proper snapshot of a live VM that will restore and boot cleanly, rather than just grabbing the files which are constantly changing.

 

As far as backing up a share on the S7000 goes, Backup Exec should be able to use it as long as it's not a hidden share. I've found restores to it to be a little hit-and-miss, but only if you try to overwrite existing files. It seems to work, just gives an odd error about Alternate Data Streams. Old version of BE here though.

 

Cheers,

Chris

[sjl]

Just wondering if anyone got anywhere with this. Just installed BE11d and had similar issues trying to connect to the 7110.

 

Cheers.

[Duke]

Nope, I can back data up but only from a non-hidden share. Have you managed to get that far?

 

I thought about trying to connect to the S7000 in Backup Exec using the root credentials (i.e. tell BE to use the [email protected] account) but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't work as I don't think the root account is used for file access or share authentication. Anyone want to give it a try?

 

EDIT: I forgot to mention another problem actually. Because the S7000 doesn't have a BE agent on it, BE can't 'snapshot' it which means it fails when doing a differential backup and only does a full backup instead. This is a bit of a problem for us as we have a large amount of data and need to do daily backups. Normally I do a full backup each week to disk and tape, then a differential backup to disk each night. Currently that differential job is backing up all the data on the SAN each night and taking up all my disk space...

 

Chris

Edited July 14, 2009 by Duke

[cookie_monster]

What agent ary you using? We have BE 11D and use the Windows remote agents but they have to be installed on the box how does it work with the 7110?

[Duke]

It doesn't technically need the remote agent to back up data from the S7000, it just likes to have it there and complains when it isn't. At the end of the day, a CIFS share on the S7000 is just a Windows share and that can be seen and accessed from any Windows machine so BE has no reason for not backing it up.

 

I just went into User Defined Shares (or whatever it's called), added \\sanhostname and all the shares that weren't hidden appeared. Make sure BE is set to logon to the S7000 using an account that has permissions to fully access the shares, root directory and files.

 

Chris

[sjl]

I cant even get it to connect when i add it as a favourite system / user defined choice. It has an authentication problem with the system. CIFS is all up and running on the same system i can use a UNC path \\adminsan01\shared and it authenticates and lets me in fine.

[Duke]

Sounds like it's a BE authentication problem. Do you have an account that has full access to the share ACL, the root directory ACL, and the files/folders in there (if the above permissions aren't already inherited)? If so, go into BE, add that account to the list of accounts to connect with and temporarily set it as the default and then try to add and view the shares. This worked okay for me in BE10d and BE12.5.

 

Cheers,

Chris

[sjl]

Will do - i haven’t explicitly allowed a user - just an AD group to which the BE user belongs. I'll have a play about with it.

 

Cheers.

[sjl]

I have finally sorted this out after trying the usernames in every format / combination known to man. Apparently with Symantec 11D, if you are trying to backup remote storage and it has NDMP enabled you will have these problems. As you know, the NDMP option is a £700+ add-on for BE. So simply disabling NDMP on the 7110 fixed the problem straight away.

[Duke]

At least you managed to get it sorted in the end then! I never enabled NDMP so never ran into this.

 

Out of interest, would NDMP solve my problems of backing up hidden shares, etc? Does NDMP still work at a file-level and allow granular restores and differential/incremental backups? At £700 it's a rip-off, but if I'm looking at a long term solution and will be getting ripped off for the BE VMware agent anyway, maybe it's best to do thing properly...

 

*goes to look up NDMP*

 

Cheers,

Chris

[cookie_monster]

the NDMP option is a £700+ add-on for BE

 

we'll not be using that straight away then, that's sooooo expensive to education concidering a windows server licence is approx £60.

 

 

@Duke - if what i've read about NDMP is correct then this is 'the' way to backup the 7110 SAN, this should allow you to backup without needing to connect to shares. More reading required I think.

Edited July 15, 2009 by cookie_monster

[RobFuller]

I know the price is a lot for the NDMP agent but it allows the SAN to create snapshots of live data so should eradicate the need for VMware or Hyper-V agents which are more costly anyway!!

Granted you won’t gain granular support for the virtual hard disks but if that’s a problem then a remote agent in the VM could get around that problem.

I will be getting an SQL agent however though as I want to go for a cluster setup with this.

[Duke]

We'll need the remote agent on the VMs for things like Exchange and SQL too anyway, but if NDMP will cover everything else then I'm very interested. The Wikipedia article on NDMP is a little bare, but from what I can see elsewhere it's an 'open' protocol, yet some bits of it only work with NetApp filers...

[cookie_monster]

Yes I read the same thread on wiki.

 

I wonder if we could get Phil Lawrence to give us the Sun oppinion

[teejay]

Ok, can one of you running Backup Exec try this below, it fixed a problem with Arcserve where it was failing if any drives had been mapped on the backup server:

In DNS, create a CNAME record for the Sun Storage server with a different name to what you currently call it, so if your Sun box is called sun.my.domain use something like sunbackup.my.domain

In your backup software, connect to the shares using the cname host name, rather than the proper host name.

[Duke]

For what it's worth I upgraded to Q3.1.0 last night and with Backup Exec 10d my backup ran fine. No errors other than the usual warning about not having the agent installed, but it still grabbed the changed files (differential backup) and restored them with no problems.

 

Chris

[john]

Where as I have had to go back to 2.5 again as I cannot get backup exec to work at all with 3.1

[RobFuller]

what backup method are you using?