Forum Discussion

Nicolas_Horchow's avatar
13 years ago

Netbackup using SAN / Filer snapshot to backup VMWare VM

Hello,

I'm trying to find a way to use my Filer (NetApp) snapshots to do VMWare VM backup instead of VMWare snaps.

The idea is to use netbackup default features (like VRay) to do a regular granular VM backup, but instead of using VMWare default Copy-On-Write (performance cost), I would like to use a SAN snapshot (with correct quiescing).

It looks like I should use replication director, but I don't know if I can use something easier (I don't need to replicate or mirror data, just need to backup to dedup volume, then copy to tape).

Any idea ? Any one using it ?

BTW, if I use NDMP, is netbackup able to catalog the files ? Is Search working with a NDMP image ?

Thanks for your feedback,

  • Thanks Marianne,

    So to sum-up it can work now with custom scripts, or it will work with 7.6 and NFS (Morten post).

    It should be fully implemented (push button mode) for next next release (7 dot something) with block mode support.

    7.6+ version allows to use all the regular Netbackup VMware features (except Sharepoint) on top of the filer snapshots.

    I hope 7.6 (and next one) will be released soon

    Thanks all,

    NH

  • Official RD support of VMware Datastore backup via NetApp is not included until 7.6 (if using NFS datastores). I am currently beta testing this feature.

    If you want something now, you would need to use NetApp SnapManager for creating consistent snapshots of the VMs, and then NDMP backup the snapshots afterwards via NetBackup.

    Regarding search then yes, NDMP of NetApp is per default indexed, but it will only give you the VMDK and config file names, no indexing of the files inside the VM.

  • Of course, NetBackup makes catalog of NDMP backup. NetBackup Serach support NDMP policy type as well.