Question about CASO and ADBO

[Bungee2010]

Hi,

we just replaced our SAN infrastructure (Dell Equallogic 6100) and also replaced our BE Server (just the Hardware / BE2012) and Tape Library (LTO5) and added a Dell DR4000 (Stand Alone Deduplication Store -> B2D) + Agents for VMWare.

We decided to go for for the VMWare Agents since we were running (a real crappy) VMWare Data Recovery for a couple of years for our "secondary" VM's. Beside that, we were using Windows Agents for our primary VM's and also for the attached (iSCSI Volumes) File-Server / Exchange / SQL - Voumes.

The backup of the File - Server (~ 600 Gb / ~ 20 hours) / Exchange (~ 450 GB /~ 16 hours) and SQL (~70 GB) already took long enough before replacing the components, but since we started backing up all of our VM through BE, we ran out of time at all.

So we were thinking using the ADBO for offhost backups but the first wanted to test this option, how to handle this option and if there is a real speed increase. Since there is no possibility to test and activate this option in a regular environment, we were told by our distributer to set up an test environment with the CASE and ADBO option (Server Option) installed to test the szenario (we do not have this possibility on short). They said the CASO and theADBO would take deep changes in the system so there is no possibility to revert these. Also there is a need for matching OS (excactly the same patchlevel for VSS) for the BE Server and Destination Servers.

Questions:

1. We do have one BE 2012 server so there is no need the a second BE server. Is there a dependency between the CASO and ADBO option, since we would only need the ADBO option (the distributer sounded like that there is a dependency and both components have to be installed)?

2. Our BE server is Windows 2008 R2. Our file server also the SQL server both have the same, just the Exchange is Windows 2008. Does the Exchange have to be 2008 R2 in order to run offhost backups?

3. Does anyone have experience with the throughput of ADBO compared to the Windows Agent? WIth the Windows Agent we have about ~ 250 MB/min for File Server and ~ 450 MB/s for Exchange (for some reasen, on the old BE Server we had about ~ > 1.000 MB/min but i couldn't figure out so far) and i assume, that the throughput will be around 2.000 MB/min with the ADBO.

Thanks in advance

Dennis

[pkh · Accepted solution]

1) CASO and ADBO are independent of each other.  They can be installed singly or together.  The problem is that for BE 2012, ADBO is part of the ESO (Enterprise Server Option) licencing package.  You cannot buy ADBO separately.

2) Yes. Both the remote server and the media server must be using the same OS.  See the Requirements for Off-host Backups section on page 1053 of the BE 2012 Admin Guide.

3) Nobody can tell you this because each environment is different.  You would have to test to get the result.

Note that ADBO does not support clustered Exchange.