Backing up VMs - Oracle RAC on VMware using vADP

[elanmbx]

Is this possible?  I was hoping to be able to backup the Oracle RAC node VMs with vADP to avoid the overhead of maintaining individual node names in policies.  I tried to simply construct a policy that uses VIP to select the RAC nodes and back them up via vADP.

Sadly, due to the nature of the shared SCSI bus defined in the RAC node (for the ASM volumes) the backups failed with a 156.

Am I missing some method to do this?  Or am I simply going to have to suck it up and maintain the nodes in a "physical" policy?

NetBackup 7.6.0.2 master - Solaris 10

Netbackup 2.6.0.2 media servers - Symantec 5220 appliances

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Backup of guests with RDM in a Vmware policy is not possible

Backup of application within VMware is only possible for Exchange, SharePoint and SQL (given point above is satisfied).

[Yasuhisa_Ishika · Accepted solution]

Please note following points in this case:

• VM with shared SCSI bus can not be backed up by NetBackup for VMware regardless of tartget IP. Backup must be fail even if you select node IP or VM hostname. For Oracle RAC test environment in VMs, iSCSI shared storage is more suitable.
• Data protection for system of each node should be taken based on node IP. System backup based on VIP is not a good option as you can take only one node at a time.It is hard to determine which node is taken, and node-specific configuration is likely lost.
• Oracle RAC should be protected by Oracle policy backup.

[elanmbx]

None of these guests have RDMs.  ASM is using virtual disks presented to them, not RDMs.

That said, it appears that the fact that I'm using a shared bus config for the ASM volumes is going to prevent me from using vADP.

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Yes, that is correct. RDM is usually the first hurdle, but yes its possible to not use them, but the shared nature of the disks are a problem. And the fact the agents dont support Oracle appplication backup type in vmware.