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Appliance Best Practices? D2D2Tape?

notesguru99
Not applicable

Hi All,

 

I have been testing the appliance now for a couple of months and would like a bit of advice please if possible on my backup plan.  We have one appliance and 20 odd Windows Servers 2008R2 on a Vmware platform using iSCSI for the SAN.

 

I would like to stage my backup jobs to tape (LTO6) eventually so this is what I am thinking :-

Full backup of all VM's at the weekend with differential backups during the week for key servers only and the key server backups are also duplicated to tape.

Servers hosting Lotus Notes - just backup the nsf and daos repositories to disk and then to tape each night.

 

Because I have 2 jobs running each night, one for the critical VM's and one for Lotus Domino Databases, it doesn't seem so easy to duplicate both tasks to the same tape - my ideal situation would be the tape backup runs from the backup set on the disk, not streamed from the live servers - during the day.  Can this be achieved by using Groups?  And will the duplicate job rehydrate my disk backups to tape or stream from the server?  I see the DirectCopy option but there appear to be no settings to tweak?

Also, is it better practice to simply backup the full VM through the vCenter server or select the server individually from the backup list, selecting all of the disks thus enabling the simplified disaster recovery?  What are the pro's and con's?

One of my concerns is that the LAN could be saturated when we backup big changes in data as the appliance sits on the LAN whereas my VM's are on a separate iSCSI network.  Would it not make more sense to situate the appliance on the same subnet and physical switch as my iSCSI SAN?  Then it wouldn't need to traverse my gateway - which has a bottleneck 100MB link to my DMZ - so my web server backups are sloooooooow....

 

Any thoughts, much appreciated

 

Stuart

 

 

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

Servers hosting Lotus Notes - just backup the nsf and daos repositories to disk and then to tape each night.

You cannot just backup the .nsf files.  These would be automatically excluded from your backups by AFE. These need to be backed up using the Domino agent.  I am not sure whether the appliance comes with such an agent.

When you duplicate a backup set, the original server is not touched at all.  Do note that since the appliance dedup all data, these data will be hydrated when they are duplicated to tape.  To put everything onto one tape, you can create a duplicate stage for each of your jobs.  The first duplicate job that writes to the tape should specify overwrite and the rest of the jobs will append to the tape.

You can just backup all your VM's by selecting them through vCenter.  You don't have to worry about SDR because when you need to recover your VM's, you just restore the entire vmdk's.

When backing up, the data flows from the host to the appliance, then to the disk.  You got to plan accordingly.

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1 REPLY 1

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

Servers hosting Lotus Notes - just backup the nsf and daos repositories to disk and then to tape each night.

You cannot just backup the .nsf files.  These would be automatically excluded from your backups by AFE. These need to be backed up using the Domino agent.  I am not sure whether the appliance comes with such an agent.

When you duplicate a backup set, the original server is not touched at all.  Do note that since the appliance dedup all data, these data will be hydrated when they are duplicated to tape.  To put everything onto one tape, you can create a duplicate stage for each of your jobs.  The first duplicate job that writes to the tape should specify overwrite and the rest of the jobs will append to the tape.

You can just backup all your VM's by selecting them through vCenter.  You don't have to worry about SDR because when you need to recover your VM's, you just restore the entire vmdk's.

When backing up, the data flows from the host to the appliance, then to the disk.  You got to plan accordingly.