recommendation on backing up RHEL/Windows cluster under ESXi

Question

HI All,

I am now working with a backup solution to backup RHEL and Windows cluster. I know nothing about how to backup clustering environment.

Master Server will be installed on Windows Server 2012, with latest Netbackup release.

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I believe there are other documents mentioning the backup method for clusters, but if it's under ESXi, may I know if it's possible to backup all Guest OS vmdks using VMware policy, and leave the shared cluster disk to backup using other policy?

For restore then I will restore the guest OS first, followed by data disks.&nbsp;

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Any comment or advise? Thanks a lot!

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riaanbadenhorst · Accepted Answer

Hi,

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Just place agents in all the guests. I've never heard of someone doing SAP on Sybase but you can just backup the Sybase DB using a Sybase policy. We can do the same for SAP on Oracle if people prefer to just use RMAN and not Backint.

marianne · Answer

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.

riaanbadenhorst · Answer

Hello,

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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).

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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)

scott_123 · Answer

As for Storage Foundation and VMware backups, the docs state&nbsp;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 &nbsp;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&nbsp;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.

riaanbadenhorst · Answer

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.

jeorainc · Answer

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?

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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..

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recommendation on backing up RHEL/Windows cluster under ESXi

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