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Advice on planning backups

nomisAdmin
Level 2

Hello all, I hope someone out there can help me with some advice, tips, and tools.  I've recently started working for this company (just over a month).  The previous person left on bad terms and there's no documentation of any sort and things have been falling apart for a while.

I've discovered recently that all the backup jobs were failing because the drive it was backing up to was full and the Dell PowerVault was broken so it couldnt offload anything to tape.

I've been tasked with getting back to normal.  I've temporarily moved the backup jobs to another NAS box for the time being, to buy a little time to plan a proper solution.

Our current setup right now is a poorly resourced and configured VMware virtual machine running Windows 2003 R2 32-bit and Backup Exec 2012 backing up across the network to a Seagate NAS (16TB).

I'd like to move us to a real tape library, like the Scalar i40, and perhaps while we're at it upgrade to Backup Exec 2014.  I'd like to present a few solutions to my boss, but I'd like to be able to approximate what our storage needs are.  How much space can we look at backing up and forecast how much it would grow.  I've done some stuff through the CLI and got some sizes of the full and incremental backups of the few that have sucesseded prior to my time and the week or so that I've gotten them to back up on the NAS.  Is there any sort of planning calculator, spreadsheet I can use to forecast this type of info?

Can I stick with running Backup Exec on a virtual machine, if so I'm thinking i'd spin up a new Virtual with Server 2012, and some more resources, I'm also thinking of getting a fiber card (if we go with the Scalar) for faster backups.  Or would it be better to dedicate a small physical server as my backup server?  We do have 2 NettApp SAN's but they're full and in need of TLC too.  We're already looking at getting a new SAN as well, can I do my backups to disk on that and then have it dump those to tape for retention?

 

Sorry for all the questions and variables, the last time i had to manage Backups was about 8 or 9 years ago and they were all setup properly to begin with so it was really just monitoring and minor mantenance here and there, and this is quite an undertaking so i want to make sure i research the right types of solutions.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

Hi,

 

No tool available to assist you unfortunately unless you were running some sort of monitoring tool in your environment...this would have to be done manually.

Maybe open a new Excel spreadsheet, and put down dates and backup sizes and work out your approximate growth per backup to give you an idea of how much disk space you require on disk, with a bit of added overhead for large increases in data. From my perspective, I'd go with an extra 20-30% disk space for this. Never scope for what you need now as you'll run out of space immediately.

Make it for a year, and use the approximate growth as an indication of how backups are likely to grow per day.

It is entirely possible to do a D2D2T strategy, where primary backups go to disk for faster backups and restores, and then streamed off to tape for longer retention. Bear in mind that a normal B2D and dedupe folder need to be DUPLICATED to tape, not backed up as this will mess up the way that BE sees the catalogs and information on tape, and will cause you to have failures when trying to restore.

Also bear in mind that if you go the dedupe folder route, backups will be faster, but duplicating to tape causes the data to be rehydrated, so this needs to be left for a day/s when activity on your system is low.

With regards to the virtual VM, I wish this would be supported but it is from a VMware perspective. This was implemented in an environment I used to look after, against my wishes. It works, and works fairly well, but the VM won't VMotion to another host, and the MAJOR issue came when the media server VM lost access to the library, requiring an unnecessary reboot of the host itself.

If you go the dedupe route, make sure your media server complies with the requirements as per the link below:

http://www.symantec.com/backup-exec/system-requirements?fid=backup-exec

Thanks!

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3 REPLIES 3

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

Accessing a tape drive from a VM is not supported.  It is recommended that you get a physical machine to load BE.

Nobody would be able to tell you how much storage you require because we do not know how much data you have and how long you want to keep them.  The variables that you need is the total amount of data that you have, how often are you going to back them up and how long are you going to keep each backup set.  This will allow to you calculate the total amount of storage required.

 

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

Hi,

 

No tool available to assist you unfortunately unless you were running some sort of monitoring tool in your environment...this would have to be done manually.

Maybe open a new Excel spreadsheet, and put down dates and backup sizes and work out your approximate growth per backup to give you an idea of how much disk space you require on disk, with a bit of added overhead for large increases in data. From my perspective, I'd go with an extra 20-30% disk space for this. Never scope for what you need now as you'll run out of space immediately.

Make it for a year, and use the approximate growth as an indication of how backups are likely to grow per day.

It is entirely possible to do a D2D2T strategy, where primary backups go to disk for faster backups and restores, and then streamed off to tape for longer retention. Bear in mind that a normal B2D and dedupe folder need to be DUPLICATED to tape, not backed up as this will mess up the way that BE sees the catalogs and information on tape, and will cause you to have failures when trying to restore.

Also bear in mind that if you go the dedupe folder route, backups will be faster, but duplicating to tape causes the data to be rehydrated, so this needs to be left for a day/s when activity on your system is low.

With regards to the virtual VM, I wish this would be supported but it is from a VMware perspective. This was implemented in an environment I used to look after, against my wishes. It works, and works fairly well, but the VM won't VMotion to another host, and the MAJOR issue came when the media server VM lost access to the library, requiring an unnecessary reboot of the host itself.

If you go the dedupe route, make sure your media server complies with the requirements as per the link below:

http://www.symantec.com/backup-exec/system-requirements?fid=backup-exec

Thanks!

nomisAdmin
Level 2

Hi Craig,

Thanks for your input.  I think I will go the Physical Server route (or at least try to convince management that's the correct route).  I have used the Backup Exec CLI to dump all the backup job history to a CSV and i think i have a rough idea on the backup space requirements using that information.  I wish there was a 'Forecast" button or something in Backup Exec that would look at your past history and calculate some numbers for you.  I definitely inherited a mess, so It would be nice to get started with new equipment, and setup the backup jobs again, i see we're currently backing up a lot of useless files and folders.