Netbackup 7.0 setup with VTL and VM

[Sriram]

Hi all,

Do any one have these kind of setup running ??
 

We are planning to implement netbackup 7.0 non enterprise and enterprise edition in our setup.

Our setup:

Hardware:
 
Cisco UCS B200 M1 blade server on Cisco UCS 5108 blade chassis
2 quad core Intel Xeon 5500 series processors
48 GB (upgradeable upto 96) of DDR3 memory
13 servers in total with 6 on one firecell (datacenter) and 7 in another
There are no local disks and the hosts are all boot from SAN enabled.
One dual port Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card supporting upto 20 Gbps (2.5 GBps) of I/O per blade. It supports Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) allowing ethernet and fiber traffic to flow through the same adapter

Base system:

VMware vSphere 4 hypervisor
13 ESX hosts

Primary Storage:
 
Dedicated storage : NetApp FAS2040
Shared storage : Netapp (model unknown) - 5 TB

 
VTL :
 

Netbackup 7 enterprise server acting as Master / Media server, with standard client license with support upto 80 clients

Sepaton S2100-ES2 -Rack Ready Base VTL System

Client - Server based LAN backup
Backup server : Windows server 2008 standard edition R2 64-bit VMware virtual machine

SAN device : Netapp

SAN : 2 * 5 TB across two different data centers with each of them in separate fabric (no interconnection between the storage)

VTL and Tape Library are manually connected to brocade storage switches in the two different datacenters, thereby connecting to the 2 * 5 TB SAN
 
Tape Library:

IBM TS3200 (TWO LTO4 FS drives)
 

This is going to be from scratch.  I would appreciate to hear from you all about best practices involed for implementing Netbackup 7.0 with the above setups.  I have collected some, but still i would like to here from this forum users b'cas i know there are more experts here in this forum.

We are actually planning to impletement Netbackup master server on VM host and a proper media server on the another VM host.  What are the possible bottlenecks seen here.

Please advice.
 

Thanks

Sri

[bak]

Do you mean that you intend to run your master & media servers on VM Guest servers?  This is technically possible, but not advisable.  Media servers are heavy on Disk/FC IO and Network IO, both of which are going to be severely constrained on a virtual machine.

Not only will you not have very fast performance to your backup devices, but your access would all be virtualized so you severely limit your configuration options.  Troubleshooting device issues would be a major headache if you had to configure multiple layers of FC connectivity to the VTL.

If you have to run one server on VM, it is better for that to be the master server (assuming it never runs any backups whatsoever).  Even still this does not make sense because you would be paying for a full media server license, but putting the master server in an environment where it could not be fully utilized as a media server.

For a small setup I would go for two small blade servers for your master & media servers (assuming a single site), but may go for stand alone rack mount servers if these were going to be located at separate sites.

[vijaygvk]

can NB7.0 Enterprise Media server and Master server can be virtualize in vSphere 4.1 if yes please share step by step details.

Thanks

Vijaygvk

[teiva-boy · Accepted solution]

It's not advised you virtualize a media server, due to the heavy I/O needed when doing backup operations.  Not to mention, device access can be problematic, and vMotion/DRS is not supported I believe when physical device mapping is involved.

You can however virtualize a Master server, though you need to still size it like it's on a physical system.  Meaning lots of CPU and RAM.  

There is no point in sharing step by step details, as it's no different than any other P2V conversion.  

Being close to a month old, you should open up your own thread.

[Marianne]

Media Server is only supported with Disk storage (not VTL).

Statement of Support for NetBackup 7 in a Virtual Environment ( Virtualization Technologies :(    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH127089