Forum Discussion

lone_warrior's avatar
21 days ago

NetBackup Master and Media Filesystem sizing

Hi Team,

I'm new to NetBackup and need your advise on filesystem size for installing NetBackup.

We have 1 master and 2 media servers. Size of the data that is in scope is around 300Tb and need to backup around 300 servers. Planning to install NetBackup version 10.4

Need your advise on below:

  1. What RAID needs to be setup for master and media servers?
  2. What filesystems need to be created?
  3. What should be the size of each filesystem?

Thanking in advance. Really appreciate for any sort of help.

  • Hi

    I would strongly suggest you review the NetBackup Planning and Performance Tuning Guide (https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/doc/21414900-146141073-0/index). This will provide most of what you need to know. 

    If this is a greenfield site, then you could also approach your local Veritas account team to provide some advice on how the data protection could be achieved. 

    Some of the items you will need to determine (which will in turn give sizing information), is the operating system you wish to use (Linux or Windows - either is good, but depending on workload and local experience one may be better than the other, and a mix can also be a good choice). Do you have VMware or any other hypervisors to protect? What database systems might require protection? What are your data retention guidelines and where do you want to store this (disk/tape/cloud based backups)? etc. etc.

    There's a lot you are not saying that guides the answers - the guide I mentioned will give you a good start to ask more pointed questions. 

    Cheers

  • Thanks David for quick response. Below are some more details.

    OS : RHEL 8.10 (Both Master and Media Servers)

    All 300 servers are VM's managed by VMware in which there are SQL Servers which needs to be backed up using Netbackup SQL agent.

    Data will be stored in Data Domain for 1 month retention.

    • davidmoline's avatar
      davidmoline
      Level 6

      Hi lone_warrior 

      For the primary server, I would be considering using RAID 1 only. Write speed to disk is more important for the primary server. Given the information on what you are protecting the NetBackup file system should not grow beyond 500GB - this file system should all be easily accommodated with the OS volumes on the server's boot drive (mirrored in hardware). 

      For the media servers, as you are using a DataDomain for backup storage, these do not need to be sized much beyond the OS requirements (more memory is better of course -especially if you add MSDP to the media servers). 

      I would consider adding to the media servers enough disk to create an Advanced disk pool to use for the NetBackup catalog backup - this may need to be 2TB or so (1 or 2 full copies, plus incremental nbackups). RAID 5/6 for this volume is fine. 

      Given you also have SQL backups to consider - the Advanced disk pool may be a good staging location for the transaction logs before using an SLP to push them to the DataDomain for longer retention. 

      If you don't already have the DataDomain, then consider MSDP for backup storage. One (or two  - for two copies) suitably sized RAID storage arrays would (I think) be considerably cheaper than the DD. The size of the MSDP would need to be somewhere in the vicinity of 3-400TB usable space to allow for 1 month of data retention.

      Cheers

  • Hi lone_warrior 

    Use a volume manager and file system like ext4/ZFS that allow to be extended online. You don't have to size the file system for largest configuration from the beginning.

    /Nicolai