Backup Exec : virtualized Domino (Lotus Notes) server

[Lohenthal]

Hi all,

I need to backup a Vmware environnement. Among the VMs there are Lotus Domino servers.

For now I backup the VMs and plan to use the GRT capabilities of BE to restore the Domino databases.

But unlike MS products like Exchange it seems there is no GRT capabilities for Domino. So my two questions :

* Will my customer be able to restore databases (.nsf files)?

* If yes, can we say that  the database option is useless  in that environment ?

Or :

* It's mandatory to backup virtual domino servers as if they were physical machine through the agent and the database option

Thanks for your help

[teiva-boy]

You could back up the image, providing you are okay with a crash consistent copy.  Which is essentially the same as pulling the power on a server, and hoping your data will come back okay...

Or do an agent based backup.

It's not the end of the world to have to do a few one-off agent based backups.  Because GRT is flaky at times, many customers have reverted back to this.  

[pkh]

There is no VM GRT for Domino.

You can back up the entire VM and treat the .nsf files as individual files.  You then use GRT for files and restore the .nsf files.  However, restoring the .nsf files as files without the Domino agent often results in  unusable corrupt databases.

It would be better to run a separate job to backup the .nsf files using the Domino agent.  Do this as if the VM is a physical machine.