• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

VMWare: working with large VM's

V

videodrone83

Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2006
Messages
527
I'm wanted some input on vmware backups.

I currently use NetVault and have looked at vRanger and also Veeam. My issue is how do you guys handle the rather large VM's in your production for backups?

I have 1 VM that totals over 2tb in shared storage, has massive amounts of changed files in a days time. I run D2D on it only on the weekends for it since it takes forever to backup, I run file level backups on it daily because i need the crucial data offloaded to tape. The snapshots are equally large hence it's only run on weekends (also doing full snapshots). I'm just wondering if I should just do CBT with full's on the weekend or no? any suggestions.

And i know its silly that we use tape but old habits are hard to get rid of for my CIO
 
As an employee of a backup software company I can tell you most definitely tape is not dead. :)
The LTO-6 drives I have are plenty fast and with a 2.5TB native capacity the tapes end up being cheaper than spinning disk right now for archival purposes. Not to mention they dont need power once the data is on the tape.

That being said back to your question, which I am going to ask a question of you. What are your restore time objectives and restore point objectives?

In general a full VM backup once a week and file level backups daily is a very good way to go. (Making sure that your file level backups 'know' about your VM backups as to only backup files since the last VM backup)

CBT VM backups will most likely reduce the time of the daily backups, but how long will that take you to restore a single file if you need to? Will you be able to restore with the granularity that you need with a VM backup?

Personally I would do D2D2Tape on all of your backups if you are not already.
 
we have a 6TB PACs VM (radiology imaging - lots of changes) that gets backed up every to disk night using reverse incremental backups and change block tracking with Veeam... takes a while but your immediate last backup is a full VM and not an incremental. The backup is taking up about 2TB right now (which includes a 2TB PACs tesing VM and a web server for it all in the same backup job). We use Arcserve after that to move the backup to tape during the day
 
Dytralis said:
we have a 6TB PACs VM (radiology imaging - lots of changes) that gets backed up every to disk night using reverse incremental backups and change block tracking with Veeam... takes a while but your immediate last backup is a full VM and not an incremental. The backup is taking up about 2TB right now (which includes a 2TB PACs tesing VM and a web server for it all in the same backup job). We use Arcserve after that to move the backup to tape during the day
Click to expand...

6TB in patient images? It should be pretty static then except for new studies. Unless you are doing a large volume of images.
 
I am trying to push Tape on the end here. I love tape. LTO is reliable.

Also, I keep data and VM's separate whenever possible.
 
Restore times for VM backups are within a 8 hr window, most of our critical data is still on physical. Our file level backups are the utmost critical, within 30 minutes to an hour.

I work at a financial institution and our large VM is similar, it's archival for receipts/transactions.

I have been only doing full VM's on weekends and full file levels daily. I would love to use veeam with CBT's but going off to tape is the fun part as it uses powershell.

I have LTO-6 IBM's in a spectralogic unit.

I would like to get the VM's done nightly instead if only going on weekends though.

Dytralis - On your first full with Veeam im sure it's large but how large are the incrementals that are run nightly.
 
Dytralis said:
we have a 6TB PACs VM (radiology imaging - lots of changes) that gets backed up every to disk night using reverse incremental backups and change block tracking with Veeam... takes a while but your immediate last backup is a full VM and not an incremental. The backup is taking up about 2TB right now (which includes a 2TB PACs tesing VM and a web server for it all in the same backup job). We use Arcserve after that to move the backup to tape during the day
Click to expand...

I have an 8TB file server I back up with Veeam, the first does take a while (Veeam will error out after 2 days if things are really slow, some hardcoded time limit), but yeah, the incrementals aren't bad at all provided you aren't changing a TB a day.
 
Little Birdy has informed me that Veeam will most likely support tape backups in the next major revision.
 
That's what I'm told too. It's about time. We'll see how their 1st take at tape is...
 
They're also supposed to support public cloud based backups and replications as well.
 
I have two file server VMs with ~2TB each on them. They are backed up nightly using Veeam to disk with the following Advanced settings:

Backup Tab - Reverse Incremental
Backup Tab - Active Full Backups, Weekly
Storage Tab - Inline DeDup enabled
Storage Tab - Optimal Compression
Storage Tab - Optimized for LAN target
vSphere Tab - Enable VMware Tools quiescence
vSphere Tab - Changed block tracking, both checkmarks enabled
Advanced Tab - Enable automatic integrity checks enabled
Advanced Tab - exclude swap file enabled

My incrementals are about 1GB large on disk after dedup and compression and those complete in under an hour in pretty much all cases. A full backup of the 2TB VM takes about 10 hours. The file level restore through Veeam is as quick as one can click the right buttons in the right order.

IMHO the key to faster backups is to run smaller servers. ;)
If you take a hard look at your 4TB VM, do all files need to be on that VM or could you stand up a second VM and put 2TB on it? If you can do that then you can run one 2TB full one night and the other 2TB full another night. Nightly incrementals. Done.
Alternatively, if you don't want to stand up a second VM, then just lay out your disks on your VM in such a way that you can do full backups on 2TB one night and the other 2TB another night. In Veeam you can select which drives you want to include in your backup job. You basically create two backup jobs for the same VM. The overhead of doing so is that you back up your OS drive twice but that's no different than setting up a second VM really except that you don't have to pay for the OS license and other resources that the second VM will take up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top