recommendation on backing up RHEL/Windows cluster under ESXi

The big question in my mind is what exactly is being clustered?

A File Server cluster should be fine getting backed up as vmdk using VMware policy, but something like a Oracle cluster will probably need traditional installation of NBU software on cluster nodes with the appropriate agent backup.

Hello,

If you're running the amazing Storage Foundation HA 6.0.1 or later, and you've configured the VMwareDisks agent for the resources in your cluster, then you can backup the entire guest with VMware policy (provided all disks are VMDK), (and provided that the application is SQL, Exchange, VMware, or just files....no support for Oracle).

Otherwise you can protect the OS with VMware policy and the clustered resources (running on RDM) by an inguest client and the relevant policy (Windows-NT, SQL, Oracle, etc,etc)

As for Storage Foundation and VMware backups, the docs state to back up a VM that contains Veritas Storage Foundation Volume Manager volumes, disable options for Exclude deleted blocks and Enable file recovery from VM backup.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO70878  implies the issue above is specific to Windows only, but all other documentation about the limitation is unclear as to whether it's only Windows or if it also impacts Linux, Solaris x86, etc.

Even if you can use VMware backups to protect an entire cluster, if you're using Storage Foundation, you may not get the features you want and may want to use an in-guest Client for backups anyway.

Oh dear, thanks for pointing that out Scott. I was under the impression that the SFWHA 6.0.1 release was actually helping us do backups of the entire VM (by removing the need for RDM).

Not impressed by this lack of integration between SF and NBU. Would have thought this was solved long ago.

Thanks all for your advise. Let me describe more on my environment.

My environment will use VMware free license with no Vcenter.

There will be SAP running with sybase under the RHEL cluster. And an unknown application on the MS cluster (which I will probably use file level backup after the application offline)

I thought of using VMware policy for my guest OSes, but my colleague said that in order to setup cluster under VMware I should use the "bus sharing" option for the VM, and that will grey out the snapshot option, meaning that I cannot use VMware policy type for the Guest OS of the cluster?

Also, I read the guide for SAP, it only supports backup with oracle or SAP DB. What if I use Sybase, can I separate two policy, one for SAP and one for Sybase? Still figuring out the solution..

Thanks for your reply and if it's applicable we will use the sybase policy for the sybase. But what about the sap? Is it possible to use SAP policy? Or just file-level backup?

I also want to ask about backing up the vmdk guest OS. As the VM Guest will form cluster, as I know in order to do so it is required to enable the option of "bus sharing" on VMware profile, which will eventually grey out the snapshot. So if snapshot is not possible, is that the only way to backup the Guest OS is BMR?

Or is there any other approach to form cluster on VM guest without using "bus sharing"? As I don't have the concept on the VMware, I would like to hear more on your advise! Thanks a lot!

A SAP policy is basically only a frontend for calling backint (sap util) which will then backup the datasbase (which is usually Oracle). So as I said, I'm not sure if you can use backint to backup the sybase.
 

Storage Foundation HA (veritas cluster) 6.0.1 and later allows you to create a cluster without shared disks. It is done by dynamically attaching and detaching the disks (via vcenter/vmware integration) to the vm that is being onlined/offlined. In other words, if your clustered application is brought online on vm1 then the disks are added to the vm as part of the online process, and the top resource come online. If you failover, the resources are brought  offline, and the disks are removed from that vm, and added to the other vm, and then the top resources come online.

So the disks aren't shared, so you don't have a shared SCSI bus issue.