Simplifying NetBackup Management at Scale with MSDP Volume Group (MVG)

Modern enterprise IT environments are rapidly evolving and growing, requiring a data protection solution that optimizes and manages storage at large scale. The NetBackup MSDP Volume Group (MVG) feature, released in NetBackup 10.5, is designed to address the storage scalability and manageability challenges.

Customer pain points

• Workload distribution and balancing: Managing multiple MSDP pools with thousands of workloads can be complex and time-consuming. The process of assigning workloads to these pools is labor-intensive during the initial deployment. It is equally challenging to assign new or rebalancing existing workloads as part of the day-to-day operations.

• Failure handling and resilience: Although Storage Unit Groups can be enabled to provide fault redundancy for MSDP, Storage Unit Groups do not support many advanced copy functions and do not address load distribution

• Storage scaling: As data and workloads grow, more MSDP pools are needed to scale the storage, which in turn needs workload rebalancing, and configuration change.

Why NetBackup MVG?

NetBackup MVG addresses all these challenges by grouping multiple physical MSDP volumes to create a virtual volume for NetBackup.

Simplified Backup Management at Scale: 

• Automatic workload assignments to physical nodes within an MVG volume
• Adjust workload assignments when storage becomes imbalanced
• Load balancing for opt-dup and replication jobs

Improved Resilience

• Redirect backup jobs to other nodes in case of node failure

Seamless Storage Capacity Expansion

• Expand storage capacity within an MVG volume without job interruption

What is NetBackup MVG?

As shown below, an MVG server is a lightweight MSDP server that groups multiple MSDP physical volumes (local disk or cloud) together to form a large MVG volume and presents it to NetBackup as a single storage pool. During backup, restore or other NetBackup operations, the MVG enabled OST plugin running in NetBackup communicates with MVG server to select the physical MSDP server to use. MVG server selects a physical MSDP server according to its load balancing and failure handling algorithms. Once an MSDP server is selected, OST plugin will use the server directly and thus no data goes through MVG server itself. This makes MVG volumes highly dynamic, scalable and efficient, and gives MVG server the flexibility of managing the physical MSDP server for load balancing, failure handling, storage expansion etc. to simplify the management at scale.

Configuring and using NetBackup MVG

Configuring an MVG server and MVG volumes is straightforward. To set up an MVG server, simply check the “Enable MSDP volume group (MVG) service” option during the MSDP server creation process as shown below.

When creating a new disk pool, select an MSDP server with an MVG tag in the storage server list and choose “Add MVG volume” as shown below. The Web UI will display all the physical MSDP volumes, and one can use the filter to select the desired volumes to create the MVG group.

MVG disk pools are tagged with an “MVG” label in the Web UI as shown here.

MVG as an enabler for software defined scale-out storage for NetBackup

With NetBackup MVG’s ability of managing multiple nodes as a single system, performing dynamic storage scaling and workload distribution, together with proper storage and node management layer, it can be used to build scale-out storage systems for NetBackup as shown below. For example, with NetBackup Flex HA appliances, one can build a system that provides data resilience, service level availability, and management at scale. This feature system leverages the best technologies in the market: a reliable and high-performance storage subsystem for data availability, resilient and secure services from Flex HA, and storage pool scalability with MVG. A major advantage of this approach is that all of these are based on existing NetBackup components requiring minimal learning for deployment, management, and support. One can also build such system with BYO hardware with proper storage and node resilience.

MVG Use Cases

MSDP MVG can be utilized in all scenarios where MSDP is applicable. It is particularly powerful in large NetBackup environments. Below are illustrations of potential MVG use cases.

Use case 1: Backup to local MSDP MVG pool and duplicate to MVG cloud pool

NetBackup Environments

• Thousands of workloads
• Multiple MSDP pools, each with a local disk volume and one cloud volume
• Build two MVG volumes, MVG-local-vol and MVG-cloud-vol, from MSDP nodes

Workload Management

• All workloads are directed to MVG-local-vol and duplicated to MVG-cloud-vol
• MVG automatically assigns backups to individual physical nodes

Failure handling

• Workloads are reassigned in case of new node addition or node failure

Use case 2: Multi-Site NetBackup with MVG volume as optimized duplication source and target

NetBackup Domain Setup

• One NetBackup domain with two sites: an active primary server at one location and a passive primary server at the other
• Each site has media servers and MSDP servers to protect the clients in that location

High Availability (HA)

• The active primary catalog is replicated, such as Primary Server Availability (PSA) on Flex or InfoScale Virtual Volume Replicator (VVR), to the other site through storage-level replication for primary HA

MVG Server Configuration

• An MVG server, preferably with HA, is set up at each site as the backup storage unit for that location
• Backups are duplicated with optimized duplication from one location to the other for data resilience

Failover and Resilience

• In case of site failure, the primary server can switch to the other site and continue backup and recovery operations
• This configuration provides multi-level resilience against node, storage, and site failures

Use case 3: Use MVG as replication target

Previously, it was administratively challenging to have regional offices replicate backups to the main data center in domains with multiple MSDP servers. Now, with MVG replicated backups between MSDP nodes are automatically distributed as shown below. This eliminates the need to manually assign a remote MSDP server to one of the data center MSDP servers. Remote NetBackup domains simply replicate to the MVG pool, and the MVG server coordinates the load distribution. This approach eliminates the need for backup administrators to be aware of the internal deployment details in the data center, allowing for future changes without interrupting the NetBackup setups elsewhere.

 

Summary 

MVG provides an elastic storage pool by grouping multiple MSDP servers, and it simplifies NetBackup management for large customer environments with thousands of workloads. It enables building scale-out systems for NetBackup with either BYO or NetBackup appliances to provide storage availability, serviceability and management at scale. Since MVG is built on top of existing NetBackup components, it requires minimum learning for deployment, support, and day-to-day operations, all while providing much needed large scale storage management capability.