Netbackup 7 & VMWARE

[Heather1986]

Hi all,

I'll be doing some testing this week with a new Netbackup implementation of Netbackup 7 & vSphere 4 with vCenter 2.5.  The admin guide is pretty self explanatory, except the part about media server access to the vmware data store.  When you want netbackup to read the snapshots directly from the SAN, does this mean that any LUN which is currently used as a datastore and you want to protect must also be presented to the Netbackup media server?  

For example, let's say I have a vSphere host with two 400GB LUNs which reside on an FC SAN.  In order to have Netbackup read the snapshots directly from the SAN, I would need to have those two same LUNs presented to the Netbackup media server as well, correct?  At least that's my understanding.

Thanks for your help!  Any other "gotchas" would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Heather

[vinods]

Your understanding is correct you need to those tow same Luns only plresenred to the netbackup media server .

[RiaanBadenhorst · Accepted solution]

Before you present the VMFS volumes to the Windows Proxy/backup host server you should open diskpart and run...

Automount disable
automount scrub

[thesanman]

I setup my VMware policies to use a transport type of "SAN" to make sure the offload datapath is as I want it.  I think this is default but make sure it's set otherwise your datapath may not be as expected.

This is under the policy "options"; I'm using iSCSI Luns which have been presented to my VMware clusters and also to my Windows media server.

[Anonymous]

Just be aware on the Windows Media/Backup Proxy Server in Disk Administrator you will see for each presented datastore LUN, an unknown disk. Probably obvious, but maybe not to anyone else who is an admin onthe server.

Note: Are you really running a vsphere environment with a 2.5 vcenter server. I thought that was the first layer of the environment that gets upgraded to make your environment now 'vsphere' ie VI4 instead of VI 3.5

[teiva-boy]

It's not a question of you "should," run these commands.  If you want to do SAN based transport, you "MUST," run those commands.

Failure to do so will cause one of two things.

1.  Complete loss of VMFS

2.  Backups will not work over SAN but default to LAN.

Make sure to tune for MPIO and Jumbo frames since you are using iSCSI.

[Jim-90]

As somebody has mentioned ...

Automount disable
Automount scrub

Is mandatory for LAN-free off-host backups of VM machines.  Without this the backups server will initialize the shared LUNS because they are from a non- MS Windows environment.   Initializing the LUNs will destroy all the data that they contain.

Setting up Automount is relatively simple and documented by Microsoft.

Things to check:

• Will Diskpart automount disable - will it survive a reboot?  Yes it will.
• Will Diskpart automount disable - will it survive patching/maintenance pack update followed by a reboot? NO it will not.  On Windows 2008 it reverted back to the default value of being enabled.  I assumed at the reboot it will attempt to initialize the VMware LUNs and destroy the data.  

Until somebody tells me otherwise I don't consider this backup method very safe and you are safer using IP-based backups.    

It is interesting how this is poorly documented NetBackup.  NetBackup is not alone in this other backup products are equally guilty.    

[linuxed]

I'm setting up a test environment and I'll be testing media servers connected to a test vmware lun with both windows 2003 r2 and 2008 r2. also I'll be doing updates on both platforms to see how it works. When I know more concrete answers I'll post it.

Linuxed

[linuxed]

Don’t panic! 

As long as you run “diskpart” then run “automount disable” and “automount scrub” in windows 2003 any updates will not re-enable this feature. I ran it pre sp-2 on a windows 2003 system and the registry key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MountMgr\NoAutoMount” was still present after the SP-2 update and ensuing patches.

I agree as suggested in a previously here to disable the disk management feature for everyone.

Windows 2008 had the same results after minor updates however the SP1 update failed (go figure) so I can’t swear it will work but by all accounts it should. I know before I put it on my media servers I’ll test it in a non destructive environment.

Linuxed