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VM backups with BUE 12.5

GeekMan
Level 3

Situation:

 

The IT Manager who purchased all the HW & SW we have left 2 months ago.  I've been working with BUE for about the last 3 weeks.

 

We started with BUE about 2 years ago with v10.x.  We're now running v12.5.

 

We have a SAN ( about 1tb I think ), supporting 29 VMs ( at last count, last week ), running on 6 physical boxes ( 2 groups of 3 ).  Our DCs are separate physical boxes, but pretty much everything else is a VM.  SQL, GIS, Kronos, BUE, Exchange, Legato ( Exchange's archive ), etc.

 

I seem able to backup a vm without difficulty.  What's the VMware agent going to buy me?

 

-----

 

Note that I'm still learning VMware.  I only found out last week that the Virtual Center server is what the VMware client talks to.  ( LanDesk had applied updates and rebooted the server.  When it came back up the VMware service did not.  Consequently my co-worker and I spent a fair amout of time trying to figure out just what was wrong. )

 

We're on :

 

ESX server - v3.0.2

Infrastructure Server - v2.0.1

Infrastructure Client - v2.0.1

 

Any help/guidance would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance,

 

Tom

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Jeff_Myers
Level 3
Employee Accredited Certified

Hi Tom,

 

I assume you are doing "traditional" backups today using Backup Exec, meaning that you have placed an agent within each guest and are backing them up like they were physical servers.  The downside to this is that the backups will impact the performance of this guest and every other guest on that VMware host.  As we all know, I/O does not virtualize very well on today's VM platforms, so the only way to avoid this performance hit is to do off-host backups, meaning you go directly to the SAN storage to grab the data.

 

So right off the bat you'll be able to bypass the host for backups, giving you back some performance on your host.  Secondly, the data will move a whole lot quicker as we eliminate the VM I/O bottleneck and go directly to the SAN storage. 

 

The last significant benefit is tied to the restore side.  When using the Virtual Agent, you are grabbing a whole copy of the guest (the VMDK file).  As Backup Exec is storing those VMDK files for your Windows servers, it is indexing the contents of the VMDKs so you can perform granular file/folder restores from that backup.  So basically you do a single backup with a single stored copy of the VMDK, but you can now do two types of restores (full system restore or granular file/folder restore).  And all of this is driven by the Backup Exec GUI (meaning no VMware Consolidated Backup scripting is involved).

 

You might want to check out the weekly Backup Exec webinar if you have a spare hour.  They cover all of this information and actually show you how this is set up in Backup Exec.  Here's the link to the site.  Just scroll to the bottom to find the next upcoming webinar.

 

http://symantecmeetingcenter.webex.com/meet/web_symc

 

Jeff

View solution in original post

2 REPLIES 2

Jeff_Myers
Level 3
Employee Accredited Certified

Hi Tom,

 

I assume you are doing "traditional" backups today using Backup Exec, meaning that you have placed an agent within each guest and are backing them up like they were physical servers.  The downside to this is that the backups will impact the performance of this guest and every other guest on that VMware host.  As we all know, I/O does not virtualize very well on today's VM platforms, so the only way to avoid this performance hit is to do off-host backups, meaning you go directly to the SAN storage to grab the data.

 

So right off the bat you'll be able to bypass the host for backups, giving you back some performance on your host.  Secondly, the data will move a whole lot quicker as we eliminate the VM I/O bottleneck and go directly to the SAN storage. 

 

The last significant benefit is tied to the restore side.  When using the Virtual Agent, you are grabbing a whole copy of the guest (the VMDK file).  As Backup Exec is storing those VMDK files for your Windows servers, it is indexing the contents of the VMDKs so you can perform granular file/folder restores from that backup.  So basically you do a single backup with a single stored copy of the VMDK, but you can now do two types of restores (full system restore or granular file/folder restore).  And all of this is driven by the Backup Exec GUI (meaning no VMware Consolidated Backup scripting is involved).

 

You might want to check out the weekly Backup Exec webinar if you have a spare hour.  They cover all of this information and actually show you how this is set up in Backup Exec.  Here's the link to the site.  Just scroll to the bottom to find the next upcoming webinar.

 

http://symantecmeetingcenter.webex.com/meet/web_symc

 

Jeff

GeekMan
Level 3

Great!  Thanks so much for the info. 

 

Tom