Forum Discussion

gang's avatar
gang
Level 3
3 days ago

About MSDP BYO Servers supports Instant Access

NetBackup supports Instant Access for VMware virtual machines, SQL Server, Oracle, etc., through MSDP BYO servers. Can the backup copies used for instant access be stored on third-party dedicated backup devices, such as Dell EMC's DD storage devices or Huawei's OceanProtect X-series storage devices?

  • If the OST device supports it and you have an up-to-date plugin on the media server then yes. I managed to get it working a few years back with an NEC Hydrastor. But that was before we had the WEBUI introduced. You can get the info from your storage vendor regarding what is and isn't supported.

  • Instant Access is a MSDP only feature.  The OST compatible devices like Data Domain and OceanProtect support a feature called Instant Recovery.  Instant Recovery presents a read-only NFS datastore back to the ESXi host for mounting.  While the running VM is in a read-write mode, the change block tracking information is stored separately from the NetBackup presented datastore.  Historically, the performance of Instant Recovery has been rather lackluster compared to the performance Instant Access can provide.