BE 2010 Dedupe and Replication

[killerkhan]

Hello all, I have 2 questions...

1: Dedupe Size, I have BE performing full backups of my vmware VM. The VM is about 50GB in size. lets say I do 1 full backup the dedupe drive grows by 50GB, thats fine. Now I do another full backup of the same VM, the dedupe size grows another 50GB, so 2 full backups taking 100GB. I thought with dedupe I will save space but thats not what I am seeing, another full backup increases the size to 150GB used on dedupe drive. what am I doing wrong here? no errors anywhere, all services running everyting green no reds anywhere. Just does'nt make sense.

2: replicate data to DR site. I have 2 main sites and 1 DR site. I want to run local backups on the main sites with GRT enabled, these backups will be from a VMware esxi 4.0 U1 host, the VM's are windows 2003 with exchange 2003 and user files data. I want the ability for each site to be able to do local backups and also be able to restore data locally, I want to keep backups up to 4 weeks on the dedupe drive locally. The i want both main sites replicating their dedupe data to the DR site. I understand I will need obviously BE2010 in each site, i will need the exchange agent and vmware agent in each site. What can i do to replicate the dedupe data to the DR site? the symantec manuals and google does not offer really a good step by step how to for this. I dont want to use caso its just confusing as hell. I was wondering if I can use just the SSO or San Shared Option here, how many copies will i need 1 SSO for each site? how do I configure the SSO? how do i configure the backup jobs? how do I configure the replication job? can I do initial seeding to a portable USB drive or somethjing then move that to the DR site and then do delta change replication from that point on over wan? anyone else doing this? if so what is your setup? It would be a great help. thank you in advance.

Farid

[teiva-boy]

#1 - You need to make sure that you did all the steps to enable dedupe right, then make sure it's enabled at the job level.  I'd suggest finding a local partner that can help you, or keep reading up on all the steps to see what you missed.  Perhaps watch one of the Symantec webcasts?

#2 - You need CASO to make this work, as well as Dedupe licenses for all media servers participating.  Unless you have big links between all the sites ;)  As for the remote agents, if it's a DR site, with no active servers, you do not need to buy extra agents there.  Just load the same license keys from Main site 1 or 2 into the DR media server.  You are allowed active passive use licenses.  Thus, for passive nodes, you do not have to buy additional licenses.

[killerkhan]

as far as enabling and doing dedupe properly here is what I did...

1: upon first run of BE I setup a new dedupe Storage Folder
2: created a new backup job and point it to the dedupe device created in step 1
3: choose the vm under the vmware host in the source and setup vmware options in the job to use GRT
4: schedule and run the backup job

am i missing anything else for simple backup to dedupe device?

farid

[mcqueenna]

Did you have compression disabled?

[killerkhan]

Should I turn compression on? right now its set to...
Hardware [if available, otherwise none]

Also is there a step by step how to document that shows how to setup BE 2010 to use the shared storage option to replicate data between two Dedupe Folders on 2 servers? I have server A in main site and Server B in DR site. I want tp replicate the Dedupe Folder from Server A to Server B. seems like I need CASO but someone said you can do it without caso by using just shared storage option. But I donot see any good writeups or detailed how to on this. Any help?


farid

[teiva-boy]

To replicate, you ONLY need CASO, and NOT SSO.  Especially between sites.

If they (the media servers) were on a local LAN, you can use SSO, but over a WAN, it's CASO or bust.

[Matt12345]

I had the same issue with dedupe... not "de-duping" as much as I had expected.

I reported my findings to our Symantec SE, and he said something that made me think he was totally full of crap.

He stated that to really see dedupe work you need to backup the same server 3-4 times. It sounds crazy, but it worked for me. My 1st pass only gave me a 1.2:1 dedupe ratio. The second gave me something like a 1.5:1 dedupe... It wasn't until the 3rd or 4th pass that I really saw results - something like 237:1.

This was done on a 100 GB set of random sample data I pulled off of one of my production servers. It contained excel, word, pdf, and jpg files - along with a few misc file types.

I had similar findings when testing this with VMWare.

-Matt

[Symanticus]

Wow, so does this means deduplication is a separate license that we have to buy and it doesn't work for all of the Backup to disk folder ?

[Matt12345]

Yep..

Dedupe is a separate option that's not cheap... but it is cheaper than buying a dedupe applicance or another enterprise grade backup product with dedupe.

It also requires a 64 bit media server and only allows you to have 1 dedupe backup target per media server.

I found out about the 64 bit requirement the hard way. The BE installer let me install it on a 32 bit machine, then refused to let me use it... nice.

-Matt

[Symanticus]

I knew it :| this is going to be another option that is quite expeensive to buy for SMB ;-|

Thanks anyway.

[killerkhan]

ok, now here is another problem...

I installed CASO as suggested. Now I am able to backup my vmware using full and incremental and then able to replicate or duplicate the data from the dedupe device in production to dedupe device in DR. All is well so far. Now here is my problem. After caso and all the replication etc. now my backups dont show me the GRT objects when I try to restore. Meaning I can only restore the whole VM or nothing at all. upon reading the best practices for BE vmware agent here is what is says ...

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/311683.htm
"If you have the Central Admin Server Option (CASO) installed, you must run backup jobs for VMware resources on a VCB proxy server. A VCB proxy server must have the Virtual Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework and the Remote Agent for Windows and NetWare Systems installed."

Is VCB still used in vsphere? I have esxi 4.0 U1 with no vcenter. What are my options here?

what the hell? now i gotta setup VCB etc? anyone else run into this? i want to be able to backup vmware VM's with grt enabled and be able to back it up to dedupe device and replicate that data to DR site. whats the best solution here? thanks,

Farid

[teiva-boy]

VCB is NOT used with Vsphere or 3.5 U2.  vStorage APi's are used.  Eliminating the proxy server requirement.

[T35216]

Hi Khan,
have you read the admin manual section on optomized deduplication, basically you cannot copy your GRT backups from one Dedupe storage folder to another.  I would suggest you share the Dedupe Storage folder from your DR site and run seperate job to it.
Regards.

PS. Posters stating the blatantly obvious are really getting up my nose on these forums

[pkh]

Posters stating the blatantly obvious are really getting up my nose on these forums

Hear! Hear!