EMC xtremio (xbrick/vspex) backups

[dukbtr]

Looking for a solution to backup an EMC XTREMIO appliance.  We have access to the VMs in NetBackup and are backing up the infrastructure Vms.  The VDI/Citrix VMs are dynamic and are always changing and get recreated, therefore no backups are needed for these.

My question is, there are native BOOT LUNS that are needing to be backed up.  One suggestion was to try and mount them to a media server and then back them up as RAW device backups.  We are going to test this.  Does anybody have any experience with backing up an XTREMIO array?  If so, what was the solution you settled upon? Is there a better way to approach the boot lun backups?

Thanks

[Marianne]

Raw backup sounds like the best possible solution.

If you want to present volumes to a media server to backup as raw device, it is important to ensure that volumes are not mounted anywhere else and no I/O is taking place during the backup.

[dukbtr]

Yes, I have worked with the storage admin.  He took a snapshot of the boot lun, so the snapshot should have no I/O running.  He mapped the snapshot to our Linux (RHEL) media server, but now he doesn't know how to have the OS see it.  That is where we are at atm.

Thanks for the response.

[Michael_G_Ander]

Be a while since I worked with Citrix, but then we just backed up the "template" VM files, the VDI machines was created from. What does the Citrix admin say ?

What OS are the VDIs running ?

[dukbtr]

Took a bit of trial and error but our Linux admin figured out how to mount it successfully for NetBackup to see.  Got the backup of the 18 boot luns at 10gig each.  Fast backups,  10gig in under minute each.