Netbackup appliance 7.5.0.6 VMWare RDM backups

[Tommen]

My environment consists of several ESXi hosts with lots of VM's, complete with several RDMs.  I've got a NetBackup appliance 5230 version 2.5.3 as master/media.  According to the VMware Administrators guide,

" Install a NetBackup client on the virtual machine. You can configure NetBackup to back up the virtual machine and any RDMs as if the client was installed on a physical host. Without Snapshot Client software on the virtual machine, the features of Snapshot Client are not available."

I've got a VMWare backup policy defined which is successfully backing up VM's in my environment.  I duplicated the policy for a test vm with a rdm attached.  The VM is backing up (with the SYMCnbclient installed), but the RDM isn't included.  What am I missing here?

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

You need to install the NBU client in the VM and then backup the RDM volume/drive letter/mount point with a normal OS policy (Standard for Linux, MS-Windows for Windows VM).

To backup the RDM via the SAN, you need to see if underlying array is supported for offhost snapshot backups and follow steps in the Snapshot Client manual to configure snapshot/offhost backup.

[V4]

RDM is something limited by vStorage from vmware side. hope it is being worked out to address pass through hurdle. SYMCnbclient makes me wonder you must be using Open source as VM client (pls confirm) RDM skipping is normal behaviour with NBU unless backups were configured with below methods only

• Without Snapshot Client: Install a NetBackup client on the virtual machine. You can configure NetBackup to back up the virtual machine and any RDMs as if the client was installed on a physical host. Without Snapshot Client software on the virtual machine, the features of Snapshot Client are not available. (This configuration is not discussed in this NetBackup for VMware guide.)

• With Snapshot Client: Install a NetBackup client and Snapshot Client software on the virtual machine. Configure an alternate client backup.