Backing up Hyper-V virtual servers..
Hi, I think I'm confusing myself.I'm usingSymantec Backup Exec 2010 R3. I have one Microsoft Win 2008 R2 host server with 3 virtual servers running, which I have the virtual BE agent installed. What I'm unsure of is this: In BE, under the host server I see all three VM's and they are checked for backup. However..I also see the VM in the resource list, basically shows as a machine running the agent. My confusion/question is - do I need to back up both? do I backup the VM's under Virtual Machines on the host server AND the individual servers too? need input please, Dee
LiveStream Q&A: Virtualization, Appliance or Software – Where do backups fit?
Location: Sign up at http://buex.ec/Spiceheads Time: Wed, 22 May, 2013 -11:00-12:00EDT On Wednesday 22 May at 10.00 a.m. CDT, thanks to the fine folks atSpiceworks, Backup Exec is hosting a LiveStream Q&A:Virtualization, Appliance or Software – Where do Backups Fit?.Things are a little different this time around. This year we are happy to have have 2 power users of Backup Exec Tim Gunsteens– Manager, Logistics and Technology atCitrus County Supervisor of ElectionsCitrus County sits in a low-lying area on the Gulf Coast—prime hurricane country—so Tim must make sure that all systems, particularly the proprietary voter registration application, can recover quickly after a natural disaster. Nathan Streb– Systems Administrator –NAC Solutions The challenge for Nathan was to improve business continuity, so he began virtualizing NAC’s servers in late 2011. Within 18 months, five racks holding 30 physical servers shrank to 1.5 racks holding two VMware ESXi hosts, containing a total of 24 virtual servers running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Linux. Nathan says that, eventually, NAC’s data center will be 100 percent virtual. Charles Butler- Director of Product Management forBackup Exec. Charles has been in this role since 2008. A key component of his work is speaking with customers to understand their daily requirements for Backup Exec. You can find Charles on Twitter at@butlercp. Matt Stephenson– Your Humble Narrator I live in the Spiceworks community doing everything I can to help Spiceheads. I lead a team of 3TechnicalSupportEngineerswho are an official extension of Symantec support. But you are what we need to make this work. Sign up to join us for the live webcast and join in the conversation. We will be taking questions via Spiceworks – use this thread to post questions for the event LiveStream chat – there is a native chat client built into the LiveStream player We want to hear your questions about virtualization, purpose built backup appliances, disaster recovery and even good recipes for jambalaya. Find out what other IT Pros are doing with their backups. Talk directly to Product Management about your expectations. Help us understand more about the job backups occupy in your organization. Take a minute to jump out tohttp://buex.ec/Spiceheadsand sign up. We’ll see you on Wednesday the 22nd. PackMatt73
Cause of Slow Dedup when Hardware Is Underutilized
I'm sharing for anyone else who has run across a situation where dedup runs far slower than expected, and there are not any actual bottlenecks on any of your hardware. In my situation, I can push more than 500 MB/sec doing a simple file copy of VHD between a hyper-V host and my backup server target. But, backup job rates do not approach that at all. During backups no obvious bottlenecks - net even a single-core CPU bottleneck of dedup is present on source server or target server. The short story is that the Hyper-V agent only keeps a queue depth of 1 outstanding IO reading the source, so source storage array never sees IO pressure that would cause it to scale read-ahead to get better sequential read throughput. A normal file copy keeps queue depth at 4, source storage sees IO pressure, and scales read-ahead so you get much better throughput. My particular storage allows me to manually specify a large read-ahead, which I am now doing in pre-commands as a workaround, and increases job rates more than 50% and prevents cases where some other IO causes inexplicable variations in job rates. Full details are at the link below. http://www.symantec.com/connect/ideas/boost-hyper-v-dedup-job-rates-50-or-more-increasing-agent-read-queue-depth-beyond-1 Frankly I think this should be embarrassing to Symantec - the fact the IO queue depth matters is such a basic storage concept. It's incredibly frustrating to have good hardware completely underutilized because of this software codingidiocy. If they implemented this change, I could probably double or triple my backup rates with some more concurrency. So far, no one at Symantec has cared at all. Anyway, if after investigation you find this could be a possible cause, please thumbs-up my idea at the link above. Maybe others will find forcing higher read-ahead on source storage during backup helps job rates. (BTW you also wantto make sure your VHD access is truly sequential, not fragmented etc). Maybe someone at Symantec pays attention. But, maybe it's time to look at other products.
BE 2014 Hyper-V Differential backups of VMs with GRT enabled receive exceptions - no data backed up
I've just installed and configured Backup Exec 2014 on a Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V server and I'm receiving the following exception when I attempt to run a differential backup of my VMs with GRT enabled: During Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) operations, the necessary boot configuration files could not be loaded. Backups that were enabled for GRT may not be available for restore. No data is available for restore for these differential backups. Full backups succeed without issue. This exact error happens on both environments that I've installed BE 2014. Guest VMs are all Gen 2 VMs and both have 2012 and 2012 R2 guest VMs.
Yet another backup to tape speed issue
Dell Power Edge 1950 /server 2008 /20 gigs of ram /Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE With 1 port to san, 1 to Catalyst 4500 L3 switch /dedicated server for backup exec 2014. Used to be our old mailbox server. Tape drive is a Quantum superloader 3 connected by SAS2 Equalogic PS4100X in raid 50 with dual switches for the storage network Drive settings on the drive are currently: Hardware compression: Enabled Block size: 256KB Buffer size: 1MB Buffer count: 20 High water count: 0 Read single block mode: Disabled Write single block mode: Enabled Read SCSI pass-through mode: Disabled Write SCSI pass-through mode: Enabled Currently Just the backup of our FP server is 3.4TB and currently takes 27hours to complete on a full backup. Job Rate is 2,449 which roughly gives me a 41 MB/s transfer rate which unfortunately is below the minimum stream speed for the tape drive so the tape drive is going idle quite a bit which is probably the major cause of the jobs taking so long. Current job is a cluster job backing up the HA vm's current file is a 1.3TB VHD that has been running for a number of hours. Basically I am trying to figure out what I can do to speed this up. We Purchased the ADBO a few years ago but from what I have read lately it seems that offhost backup is fairly useless with virtual machines? And even then, would it make much of a difference with only one gigabit lead to the san. Any thoughts would be appreciated.Backup Exec 2014 Hyper-V errors/questions
Hello, I am trying to backup 3 2012 R2 servers with Hyper-V installed. I am using Backup Exec 2014 SP1 and all machines have the Hyper-V agent installed. All virtual machines have vhdx dynamic disks. Files are first backed up to disk on the media server then backed up to LTO6 tape. It appears that the backup to disk part of the job is working properly but thedupilicate to tape jobs typically (but not always) generate these errors: Final error: 0xe0009741 - Failed to mount one or more virtual disk images. Restores that use Granular Recovery Technology may not be available from this backup set. How do I resolve this issue? Do I need to convert all of my dynamic vhdx files to fixed? Thanks