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Remote agent recognise iSCSI attached drive

Uncle_romania
Level 3

Hi,

I'm currently using Backup Exec 11d on SBS2003. I'm thinking of buying an iSCSI RAID array. One of the servers I backup via a remote agent would connect to the array via windows iSCSI initiator. Will the Backup Exec remote agent recognise the RAID array as being a local disk (like windows does) and allow me to backup it's contents?

Thanks in advance

2 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS

Accepted Solutions

CraigV
Moderator
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The function of the RAWS agent is simply to communicate with the media server. You can redirect a restore, but not a backup. So no, while Windows will see the iSCSI drive presented to it and be able to use it, the remote agent won't. The only way around this is to load a full version of BE on that remote server, meaning additional cost. Thanks!

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Donald_Eady
Level 6
Employee Accredited

Thanks for the correction Craig, 

             Perhaps i misunderstood Uncle Romania. On my reading the posting it appeared to me that they were trying to backup the contents of the newly added storage location and not "Redirect" the backup to it. Uncle Romania if you would please clarify for me what youre trying to accomplish. If you are trying to simply backup the content of the attached storage using the remote agent then i believe that you would be able to acccomplish this without issue. 

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7 REPLIES 7

Donald_Eady
Level 6
Employee Accredited

It will see it as windows does... So if windows sees the attached storage as local so will B.E. 

CraigV
Moderator
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The function of the RAWS agent is simply to communicate with the media server. You can redirect a restore, but not a backup. So no, while Windows will see the iSCSI drive presented to it and be able to use it, the remote agent won't. The only way around this is to load a full version of BE on that remote server, meaning additional cost. Thanks!

Donald_Eady
Level 6
Employee Accredited

Thanks for the correction Craig, 

             Perhaps i misunderstood Uncle Romania. On my reading the posting it appeared to me that they were trying to backup the contents of the newly added storage location and not "Redirect" the backup to it. Uncle Romania if you would please clarify for me what youre trying to accomplish. If you are trying to simply backup the content of the attached storage using the remote agent then i believe that you would be able to acccomplish this without issue. 

CraigV
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...could be that too! wink

Uncle_romania
Level 3
Thanks for the replies. I haven't bought the SAN yet but I'm lead to believe windows will treat the storage as if it was a local disk ie it will appear with a drive letter in disk management. I would take it from this that the backup isn't being redirected, I would just be adding an extra partition to the existing backup. Does that sound right to you guys? Cheers again

teiva-boy
Level 6

An iSCSI array when connected to a Windows host via the iSCSI initiator from Microsoft, will present a local disk in which you can format like you would any other type of disk.  So drive letters, formatting, etc all apply like it were another hard drive.

 

Since it's iSCSI, you can share this array with really ANY host that has an iSCSI initiator installed.  For Windows 2003 it was a free download, for Win2k8 it's part of the OS.  This means you can carve up space for your client to put data on to.  As well as carve up some space for your BackupExec host to use for B2D.

 

So the answer is really all of the above posts, depending on how you want to use it and partition it out to hosts.

CraigV
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...if you're simply carving out storage and presenting to the remote server, you'd format the drive and put data on it. You're then able to backup the data from the remote server to the media server with no hassles.

Thanks!