Devising a new backup plan for Virtualised servers

[zag]

So now most of our servers are Virtualized I'm looking at a new backup strategy. Traditionally we have used Backupexec 2010 to backup individual systems.

 

This is my new plan

 

- Backup Each virtual server every weekend using Veeam [Veeam: #1 for VMware vSphere, ESX & ESXi Backup and Virtualization Management]

- Backup individual SQL servers daily using SQLBackupandFTP [http://sqlbackupandftp.com/]

- Backup main file server, sims doc storage each weekend with Backupexec 2010 [http://www.symantec.com/products/data-backup-software].

- Run a 2nd Parallel file server which mirrors the main file server as an instant backup. Use Xcopy at weekends to sync?

 

Since all our servers are now SSD based the backups for everything take less than an hour. It used to take 14hrs with normal hard disks!!

 

Does anyone see any flaws in the plan? Disaster scenarios ect?

Edited November 21, 2012 by zag

[glennda]

If SQL servers are VM's there is no harm in just letting Veeam back those up to.

 

If possible I would also recommend having a replica of each VM taken offsite for Veeam. Whether you partner with another school and just get a Nas Device and send it over to them and replicate to it.

[gshaw]

Are the SQL and File Servers virtual as well? If so just let Veeam do the lot then make a copy of the backup files either to the cloud (a bit pricey), tape (some say unreliable) or another disk (preferably removable so you can keep the copy offline)

[VeryPC_Ed]

Hey Zag,

 

What hypervisor are you using ?

 

If it was Hyper-V then I would have thought DPM would have fit perfectly for all the bullet points on there but I am guessing your possibly using VMware ?

 

We also use Veeam B&R for some of our clients and have had good experiences with it.

[zag]

Are the SQL and File Servers virtual as well? If so just let Veeam do the lot then make a copy of the backup files either to the cloud (a bit pricey), tape (some say unreliable) or another disk (preferably removable so you can keep the copy offline)

 

Yes all virtual, I just don't trust having one form of backup. Also that would only be weekly and SMT have asked for "daily backups" of the Finance System and Sims.

 

We are using Hyper-V 2008 R2 throughout other than our DC's. I tried DPM but didnt really like it. Maybe its improved since then.

 

The only thing I can think of is a DC going down, how do people backup those?

[gshaw]

Why not run Veeam daily? As it uses VM snapshots the daily backups are very quick then you can archive as often as you need.

 

For paranoia I backup our SQL database via Management Studio before any major upgrades but would avoid running Backup Exec and Veeam together on the same job

[Ric_]

So now most of our servers are Virtualized I'm looking at a new backup strategy. Traditionally we have used Backupexec 2010 to backup individual systems.

 

This is my new plan

 

- Backup Each virtual server every weekend using Veeam [Veeam: #1 for VMware vSphere, ESX & ESXi Backup and Virtualization Management]

- Backup individual SQL servers daily using SQLBackupandFTP [http://sqlbackupandftp.com/]

- Backup main file server, sims doc storage each weekend with Backupexec 2010 [http://www.symantec.com/products/data-backup-software].

- Run a 2nd Parallel file server which mirrors the main file server as an instant backup. Use Xcopy at weekends to sync?

 

Since all our servers are now SSD based the backups for everything take less than an hour. It used to take 14hrs with normal hard disks!!

 

Does anyone see any flaws in the plan? Disaster scenarios ect?

 

For a start, DPM rocks and will probably do everything you need for approx. 2p on your EES.

 

That SQLBackupandFTP thingy looks shocking - SQL will quite happily run a maintenance script and output to a network share adding less overhead and just being better.

 

If you decide to stick with BackupExec... that has licenses for backing up whole VMs too.

 

For your parallel file server look at DFS and rsync (or even RoboCopy) is far superior to xcopy.

 

Either way... with all those backups going on, you are going to destroy your SSDs.

[glennda]

Why not run Veeam daily? As it uses VM snapshots the daily backups are very quick then you can archive as often as you need.

 

For paranoia I backup our SQL database via Management Studio before any major upgrades but would avoid running Backup Exec and Veeam together on the same job

 

If all is virtual give it to veeam. I run hourly replications of some clients servers and you can't even tell. These run over the interweb to a DR site which only has a 10mb connection.

[ChrisMiles]

I cant recommend DPM 2012 enough, we use it to backup our VMWare infrastructire, as well as sql databases, files, basically everything you listed. Veeam is good at backing up virtual servers, but item level restoration is more work than with conventional backups.

 

DPM allows us to backup VM states every week but also do frequent file and database backups which can be restored almost instantly.

[plexer]

For your replication & recovery side of things take a look at Hyper-V 2012 and the shared nothing migration scenario See Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Shared Nothing Live Migration In Action

 

I use Hyperoo for backing up my 2008 R2 Hyper-V server.

 

Ben

[zag]

That SQLBackupandFTP thingy looks shocking - SQL will quite happily run a maintenance script and output to a network share adding less overhead and just being better.

 

The reason I chose that is it backs up, zips the file and transfers it to our google drive automatically with one click or scheduled. Seemed much better than scripts to me.

 

For your parallel file server look at DFS and rsync (or even RoboCopy) is far superior to xcopy.

 

Thanks, Roby copy has a mirror function I think. Could be perfect.

 

Either way... with all those backups going on, you are going to destroy your SSDs.

 

Said it a million times but SSD lifetimes far outway hard disks. Its an old wives tale that they have write limits that will in any way be reached in real world scenarios.

[gshaw]

I cant recommend DPM 2012 enough, we use it to backup our VMWare infrastructire, as well as sql databases, files, basically everything you listed. Veeam is good at backing up virtual servers, but item level restoration is more work than with conventional backups.

 

DPM allows us to backup VM states every week but also do frequent file and database backups which can be restored almost instantly.

 

Out of interest how do you back up the virtual machines themselves? Last time I looked I thought DPM couldn't do VMWare virtual machines and you had to back up the data via a client installed inside the VM, whereas with Hyper-V (as you'd expect) you could back up the entire VM via the host.

 

What made me go for Veeam was the fact if we lost the machines entirely (e.g. storage failure) you could drop the lot straight back in from a Veeam backup and carry on, whereas if you've only got the data inside the machine it'll be a lot more work to get back to a working state.

Edited November 21, 2012 by gshaw

[zag]

For your replication & recovery side of things take a look at Hyper-V 2012 and the shared nothing migration scenario See Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Shared Nothing Live Migration In Action

 

I use Hyperoo for backing up my 2008 R2 Hyper-V server.

 

Ben

 

Would love to move to 2012 server and use the live cloning option. Not convinced until I see some people using it in the real world though

[Quackers]

Have you tried HV Backup - Home

 

We use it for our 2008 R2 Hyper V's.

 

Works great creates backups while the Hyper V is running.

 

So we just write a few batch files and schedule them for how often we want the backup to take place. (We have a standard PC with many TB's of disk space in another building that we copy the backups to).

[Ric_]

The reason I chose that is it backs up, zips the file and transfers it to our google drive automatically with one click or scheduled. Seemed much better than scripts to me.

 

You may want to be careful with using Google Drive... from Google itself at Google Terms of Service ? Policies & Principles ? Google

 

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Said it a million times but SSD lifetimes far outway hard disks. Its an old wives tale that they have write limits that will in any way be reached in real world scenarios.

 

^^^ Good luck with that! Incidentally, Dell of all people have a nice little document at http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/Solid-State-Drive-FAQ-us.pdf which, on page 6, says that SSDs are not fit for heavy write usage (like in a files server of SQL server)... page 9 will help you calculate how long it is until you need to start replacing drives (which I can only hope you have in very tolerant RAID).

[ChrisMiles]

Out of interest how do you back up the virtual machines themselves? Last time I looked I thought DPM couldn't do VMWare virtual machines and you had to back up the data via a client installed inside the VM, whereas with Hyper-V (as you'd expect) you could back up the entire VM via the host.

 

What made me go for Veeam was the fact if we lost the machines entirely (e.g. storage failure) you could drop the lot straight back in from a Veeam backup and carry on, whereas if you've only got the data inside the machine it'll be a lot more work to get back to a working state.

 

You're right on all counts ofc, you can't back up the VMs and restore them in a single click. DPM takes a system state backup from inside the servers. However, having had to restore a couple of servers from scratch (no data/config at all) in the past, I can say that the extra work is minimal. You just create a new VM, boot from the windows disk and restore the snapshot over the network. I wouldn't claim its better, but its very fast, easy to do and makes it possible to restore servers to hyper-v or physical machines if the need arised. Obviusly, there are negatives, you cant backup linux or unix servers for example, but it wasnt a problem for us.

 

I believe another problem with veeam is you don't have much choice but to backup every disk on every server, which if you are also going to do a seperate file backup as stated in the OP, will require a ton of disk space.

 

Veeam is really the best for backing up vmware vms though, but the lack of file/database level backups, the cost vs DPM on our school agreement and the incident rate of server restores vs individual file restores made us go with DPM.

Edited November 21, 2012 by ChrisMiles

[gshaw]

Fair do's, interesting to hear from someone who has the VMware \ DPM combo in practice as at the time I found people tended to go either Hyper-V \ DPM or VMware \ Veeam.

 

You can exclude disks from Veeam, I do it with my WSUS server store as there's no point backing that up (it's in the advanced options for each VM in the selection list iirc). Exchange restores are better now provided you have 2010 as they've brought out an Exchange Explorer tool but take your point on SQL backups, was one thing I wasn't so keen on compared to other products.

 

Btw does ofc mean what I think it does, hope it's not #3 lol? Urban Dictionary: ofc

[ChrisMiles]

Fair do's, interesting to hear from someone who has the VMware \ DPM combo in practice as at the time I found people tended to go either Hyper-V \ DPM or VMware \ Veeam.

 

You can exclude disks from Veeam, I do it with my WSUS server store as there's no point backing that up (it's in the advanced options for each VM in the selection list iirc). Exchange restores are better now provided you have 2010 as they've brought out an Exchange Explorer tool but take your point on SQL backups, was one thing I wasn't so keen on compared to other products.

 

Btw does ofc mean what I think it does, hope it's not #3 lol? Urban Dictionary: ofc

 

LOL sorry yeah i just meant of course in a nice way!

 

Good to hear you can exclude drives in Veeam, wasnt sure on that.

 

We did originally run Hyper-V and DPM 2010 back when 2008 R2 first came out, but we migrated to VMware over some concerns really about standardisation and supportability really. Not sorry either, Hyper-V worked well, but the hosts were a bit of a pain to rig up with an iscsi san at the time. Wouldnt mind having a look at the new version though.

[zag]

Are people saying DPM is better than Veeam for Hyper-V backups?

 

I was under the impression Veeam was the up and coming superstar of virtualization backup for both platforms. I think it won the 2012 innovation award from Windows IT Pro Magazine recently.

 

EDIT: oh here it is from twitter:

 

" Veeam Wins Four 2012 Editors’ Best and Community Choice Awards from Windows IT Pro Magazine Veeam Wins Four 2012 Editors "

 

http://www.windowsitpro.com/content1/topic/windows-it-pro-2012-community-choice-awards-144460/catpath/awards

 

I have a copy of DPM if needed, I just had an aweful experience with all their agents and hotfixes when I tried it a couple of years back.

Edited November 21, 2012 by zag

[ChrisMiles]

Are people saying DPM is better than Veeam for Hyper-V backups?

 

It depends what you want. If all you want to do is back up your VMs, veeam might be the best bet. If you want to do lots of other backups aswell as the OP did, then DPM is a better option than having several different solutions.

 

And then there's the cost, licensing schemes etc.