Backup Exec 2010 - optimal setup

[catmandu1]

I'd appreciate your recommendations for our environment, including if it is advisable to purchase any new hardware or Backup Exec licenses/agents/options.

We are backing up VMware machines and physical machines (around 10 total).  VMs are connected to HP Storage Works MSA2000 SAN.  Backup Exec is installed on separate Windows machine and backups are taken over the LAN to tape.

Full backups each day are taking 15 hours.  I've been wondering if it's better to backup directly from the SAN and possibly have teh media server as a VM.

This article suggests that I have some options but they are not good ones for me

http://www.backupexecfaq.com/articles/concepts/how-do-i-get-backup-exec-to-transfer-data-across-my-s...

Option 1 offhost backup (requires Windows Enterprise but our servers are mostly Standard)

Option 2 Shared Storage (requires every VM to be a media server - 10 x new licenses would be too expensive)

Do I have any other options or am I stuck with what I have.  Really need to bring down the backup time though.  Let me know if further info is required.  Any help much appreciated - particularly interested in what others are doing.

[ZeRoC00L · Accepted solution]

You have (at least) two options to implement:

(1) Use the Backup Exec vmware agent. With this agent you can backup all your virtual servers directly over the SAN. This will improve you speed, as fibre is 2/4 or 8 GB/s. The downside is that you need to get a license for each physical node (10 in your case).

(2) Start with incremental/differential backups. These days the ammount of data increases so fast that is is almost impossible to daily backup all data.

[catmandu1]

Thanks for the quick response!  Trying to avoid anything but a full backup for the moment at least...

Option one sounds good.  I didn't realise the vmware agent was required to give the ability to backup via SAN - I thought it was just a cheaper way of buying licenses - are you sure this is right?

Have actually just bought the vmware agent and am planning to keep old version of agents to use for physical machines (backup gives warning message to update agent but I understand this is not necessary). 

So if I go with Option 1, does it matter if the media server is on the same SAN as a VM or should it stay as a physical machine?  What kind of h/w connections would be required for both scenarios?

[quicker]

Also you can consider FC LTO4/LTO5 drives for achieving much better performance.

[catmandu1]

Good advice quicker, but I checked and we're already on LT04

[teiva-boy]

The Vmware Agent lets you backup over the LAN or SAN.  Operationally it's much faster than a traditional agent based backup.  BackupExec tells the ESX host or vCenter to make a snapshot, and moves the large VMDK file to your backup target.  This when done over FC, is very fast.  

And yes the VMware Agent saves you money.  But it's also the operational benefit of being able to take a snapshot based backup and be able to restore like you did a normal agent based backup.  The Vmware agent costs about the same as 3-4 regular agents.  So if you have more than 4guests, it's a no-brainer to buy the virtual agents.  

[catmandu1]

Good to get confirmation on that - thanks.  I'll definitely try out the VMware agent.  Cheaper and faster - sounds too good to be true but I'll try that out in the next couple of weeks.

Can anyone advise if a virtual backup media server on the same VMware host is a good idea compared to the existing physical machine.  I'm not that knowledgeable about the hardware side of things so might have enough ports to connect a tape drive to the SAN anyway.

[catmandu1]

Thanks everyone for the help - I managed to confirm the performance increase when using the VMware agent (not by real testing but through the following excellent document.  I'll work out the hardware side of things separately.

[ZeRoC00L]

You're welcome. I have very good experience with the vmware agent. So let me know if you have more questions.

[catmandu1]

Sorry - missed out URL - the following link was very useful in confirming several of the points raised by other posters - hope others find this thread useful

http://webobjects.cdw.com/webobjects/media/pdf/symantec/Backup-Exec-2010-VMware-FAQ.pdf

[macpiano]

Are you saying if I use the VM backup exec agent that it is better than the traditional way I do it now with the normal remote agent on the server itself?

Our vm environment does not use a san but the vm's are on the main vm server itself.

thanks

Gary

[ZeRoC00L]

macpiano,

Probably whith the backup exec vmware agent you will get a better performance, but to be sure you can test it, just install the vmware agent on the backup exec media server and you can try it out for 60 days!

[CraigV]

1. ??? I think you're referring to SAN SSO. Backing up with the AVVI agent means your licensing requirements you mentioned are totally wrong! You license the AVVI agent per physical host. The poster mentioned he had 10 servers in total (physical + VM!!!), so you needed to find out how many hosts were involved, and advise accordingly!

So you would need to license your AVVI per host, and IF you want to back up your other SAN-attached servers, THEN you will need SAN SSO, and a full media server license + any other application license.

2. There is also the option of using deduplication which virtually nullifies Incrementa;/Differential backups now days. Besides, backing up across a SAN (using AVVI/SAN SSO) is going to show a MASSIVE difference in speed and throughput, meaning that unless you're running something like an LTO2 library and are spanning multiple tapes, you can run full backups. I personally cut down the backups of a file server from 15.5 hours to 6 using SAN SSO and running full backups!