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Hanine's avatar
Hanine
Level 1
6 years ago

Netbackup for NFS Shares

A customer of ours has the following infrastructure:

- HPE StoreEasy 1460 NAS storage
- ESXi virtual machines created as NFS Shares on the NAS and hosting Oracle on Unix Solaris and other applications on Windows (SQL, Active Directory, File Server, Print server...)

We are thinking of implementing a NetBackup solution consisting of a 5240 appliance with NetBackup software but just need to make sure if there any limitations or special requirements we need to look for in our case here since the VMs are running as NFS shares?

Will we be able to perform GRT for the applications?

8.1.2
Other
  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    Moderator
    6 years ago

    AFAIK NetBackup GRT requires a Windows based NetBackup Media Server.  Were you aware of this?

    (correction edit: the error of my ways has been pointed out to me, and GRT is fully supported with Linux and Unix and Appliance media servers).

    Is the HP StoreEasy 1460 NAS the device which hosts the NFS based VMs?

    In your list I didn't see the names of typical workloads for which one might consider NetBackup GRT - I mean you did not mention MS Exchange or SharePoint... so what were you thinking that you might want to "GRT restore" - only Active Directory?

    How many VMs?  How much GB of NFS storage for VMs?  How many NFS datastores?  How many ESXi hosts?  Describe your vCenter Server?  What versions are everything?  How are you achieving backups right now?

    Why is there this "new" need for something properly serious and eminently capable like a NetBackup 5240 Appliance?  Are you sure you need something so capable as the NetBackup 5240 Appliance to go with the tiddly little StoreEasy 1460?  Why wasn't enterprise backup baked in to your solution deliverables from the start?

    • davidmoline's avatar
      davidmoline
      Level 6
      6 years ago

      As sdo says, a 5240 is probably overkill, but putting that aside.

      You say the virtual machines are created as NFS shares - do you mean that NFS shares are exported to VMware which then uses storage to create a datastore, and the VMs are created within those datastores? If this is the case then the only options for VMware backup are NBD/NBDSSL or HotAdd (HotAdd will also require a VM guest to use as the backup host/proxy). I would recommend NBD for transport.

      There should be no problem doing file level recovery from this type of backup, and with the approriate proxy hosts in play also perform granular recovery using the appliance - refer to the relevant Exchange/SharePoint admin guide for further details on how the restore process works and its prerequisites (it will require the use of a Windows system for for granular restore - this for instance could be the Exchange server itself).