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Deduplication - pagefile excluded?

dgunner
Level 3
Partner

If I am running deduplication on BE2010 R2 (Vmware 3.5) is the pagefile.sys file excluded?

 

Thanks

8 REPLIES 8

AmolB
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Hi 

 Pagefile.sys is by default added in the global exclusion list.

dgunner
Level 3
Partner

So you can exclude files from deduplication of Vmware servers? Where can I see a list?

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Are you using AVVI or RAWS to backup your VM's?

If using RAWS then we have Global Exclusions and Active File Exclusions against things that don't need to be backed up (like the swap files) or should be backed up using a specific backup type (such as anything in the System State, SQL .mdf/.ldf files Exchange edb files etc)

However if using AVVI, we request a snapshot (using VCB or vStorage) and whatever the VMware interface presents to us uis what is backed up. We do set the parameter Snap Memory = no when requesting the snapshot through vStorage (if that helps)

You can't exclude individual operating system files from an AVVI backup.

 

 

 

bn8959
Level 4

I am thinking about creating seperate virtual hard disks for my page files (mapping them to drive P: and moving the page file on to there in the guest), then setting the disk to Independent mode in VMWare. That way they wont be snapped and therefore not backed up by Backup Exec.

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

If you have independent disks in your machines then you might have problems with GRT backups of the standard disk - so I don't recommedn your suggestion.

 

As an example of the problem check this out:

http://www.symantec.com//docs/TECH144213

 

 

bn8959
Level 4
This is a real shame, and a bit of a flaw I feel. I think this should be fixed. Other issue encountered is here: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/ja/ideas/option-supress-certain-error-messages-so-jobs-are-marked-complete-and-not-failed

teiva-boy
Level 6

Blame Vmware then.  vStorage doesn't snap those disks.  Many other backup vendors suffer the same problems.

bn8959
Level 4

In this case I dont feel the problem is with VMWare. The independent disks are working exactly as expected - thats the only reason for the feature - to exclude them from snapshots.

But what does happen - if you backup a VM that does has an independent disk, GRT fails and is unavailable for every disk on that VM. Also an error is logged for the whole job. If you intentionally make a disk independent, then you must be aware it will be excluded from the snapshot backup. I would expect Backup Exec to be able to continue to backup all the non-independent disks with GRT as normal; perhaps it could log a warning, or preferably one of those blue non-critical warning (like when you backup a machine that has a SQL database, but you dont have the SQL agent).