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GovJames's avatar
GovJames
Level 2
14 years ago

VMware Backup Hosts Redundancy/HA

The enterprise I work for just upgraded to NB 7.1 and has a large and ever growing VMware footprint.  Currently the backup methodology involves performing client side backups to multiple media servers using Storage groups. The benefit of this method is that if a media server fails, backups will continue to be sent to the remaining media servers defined in the storage group.

Because NBU 7 supports BLIB and Incremental Snapshot backups for VMware, the enterprise would like to start performing all backups via a NetBackup Media server VMware backup host. Is there a way to create redundancy as the VMWare backup host defined in each policy will be a single point of failure?

Thank you,

James

7.1.x and Earlier
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  • pikachu's avatar
    pikachu
    14 years ago

    That is correct. For 7.5 you do not have to define a backup host anymore. You just point to a storage unit (group) and any windows media server can be used as the backup host.

    Keep in mind san/iscsi backups are going to be more difficult to setup now due to the fact that the luns now need to get shared out to more than one media server.

  • oleg_rebrov's avatar
    oleg_rebrov
    Level 3
    14 years ago
    Currently in 7.1, I don't think you can have HA within the backup policies. You have to specify one (and only one) VMWare backup off host server. If you look at the release notes for the 7.5 beta which is currently publicly available, there are comments on load balancing and I believe (don't quote me on it) that it is referring to load balancing across the off host server.
  • Fred2010's avatar
    Fred2010
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    Hi,

     

    I am afraid there is no way (yet) to do this...

     

    It would indeed be great if you could add a group of VM Backup hosts in the policy, instead of just the one...

     

    Symantec: Is this on the roadmap?!?

     

    Pretty please?

     

    Fred

  • pikachu's avatar
    pikachu
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    That is correct. For 7.5 you do not have to define a backup host anymore. You just point to a storage unit (group) and any windows media server can be used as the backup host.

    Keep in mind san/iscsi backups are going to be more difficult to setup now due to the fact that the luns now need to get shared out to more than one media server.

  • faceless's avatar
    faceless
    Level 3
    14 years ago

    Hello,

    Following page 144 of the NetBackup 7.1 for VMware Admin Guide:

    NetBackup supports multiple backup hosts. When a single backup host is
    saturated with a backup process, another backup host can be added to increase
    backup throughput.

    Is that possible to have one backup host in each data center in order to have a failover in case of disaster?

     

    ++

    Faceless.

  • pikachu's avatar
    pikachu
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    A fail over in that sense does not exist.

     

    In NBU75 you do not have to say anymore this is my backup host. You point to the storage unit/group and which ever media server can write to it will be the backup host.