vCenter Backups of VM's

[Vini]

So... I suspect I'm not alone here. VM's outgrow the infrastructure and backups become forgotten about an outdated.

Currently backups are taken to tape using Backup Exec 2010 (latest SP/patches) with VM agent, but this is slow and BUE 2010 doesn't seem to be very VM friendly.

There's newer versions of BUE but the whole GUI's changed and it's awful (to look at). So awful we've not upped beyond 2010.

The last time I was involved in managing backups of VM's etc, we deployed Veeam, back then it didn't do native tape backup, but I noticed this is now possible. We're currently running VC 5.1, how is Veeam for this?

Anyone have any examples of pricing?

We've ~20TB/200 guests in VM's.

The ability to quickly restore full system and files from within would be a necessity. Tape, as it would make use of our existing kit, but I suspect the plan is to go sky high at somepoint.



A colleague had a Barracuda Backup Server 890 device on trial for a similar project, but as is often the case I got involved in this after the Barracuda trial had finished. So I am not sure how feasible that would have been. The line speed is already maxxed so it wouldn't be a feasible option right now anyway.

How do you backup yours?

[stilkun]

At my previous workplace I worked with someone who was a partner of company specialised in data backup and disaster recovery which allowed my workplace to purchase two ESX 4.0 servers at low cost which we later upgraded to ESXi 5.1 and had 3 TB of online cloud storage plan to back up for 4 or 5 VM server which had lots of data which almost filled it all up. We used one server as production and the other as a local recovery and backup of VM snapshot taken hourly using a software which is then replicated up to the datacentre of the disaster recovery company and only kept 2 weeks worth of snapshots as there was lots of data stored on the VM. This allows the workplace to continue working using the recovered server VM remotely if the disaster strike.

That mean for other 12 or 15 VM running, we used VEEAM to back up server from production to the local recovery server.

[Vini]

stilkun, thanks for the reply, thats how I had it where I worked previously. That was one site, with an offsite redundancy. So fairly simple.

Where I am now, budget is not available for another host - yet. This is partly due to bad planning and production environment outgrowing the backend etc, not uncommon yadda yadda.

The idea is to improve our tape methods, whilst looking into ALL the other options.

The issue with having a redundant host, is that we have multiple sites and some with poor connectivity.

[bytejunkie]

for anything but the smallest installs, you're going to need to investigate and maybe upgrade to NBU.
you've got to get everything else in tip top shape too. its definitely worth looking at 10GB management networks for vm environments.
you'll max the network out long before you do a decent tape unit.
I'm currently overviewing an estate backing up close to 300 vas with NBU pure disk appliances. it works well. I'm guessing you;'ve not got a spend available?

[bytejunkie]

couple of points I've just remembered. abandon agent backups for big estates. they waste time. make sure connectivity between tape unit and venter server is good. 10GB or fibre. 200vms isn't a small estate. proper venter backups go from venter to host, so make sure theres good connectivity to the vm host too.

[Splash]

What version of ESXi/vCenter are you licensed for? I've been tinkering with vSphere Data Protection in prep for my new SAN install in the new year and I've been pretty impressed with what is essentially a free product.

It's backup to disk only, so not really any use for archiving, but it might work as part of a staged process (backup to staged disk using VDP, backup the staged area using BackupExec or something similar). In all honesty if you can get the spend approved then Veeam is well worth it though (I'm sure Moby Dick will be along at some point with his green hat on ) purely for how easy it is to manage.

As someone who has been recently using the latest version of BackupExec and can't wait to get away from it - don't waste your money on the upgrades. It's really pretty terrible at dealing with VMs, and requires an agent to be installed if you want to be able to do item level backup/restore. It also doesn't play nicely with Server 2012 R2 in my experience (and certainly won't install as an app on 2012).

[wasabi]

One of our sites is running Veeam 6.5 with approx 8Tb of files on vcenter5.1. They require tapes for contractual reasons but primary backup is to disk for real-world use since tape sucks for speed. Currently we just use a cheapy old backup to tape program to backup the Veeam raw files to disk - key is to use synthetic fulls then just grab the fiels after job completes triggered by post-job-completes task.

Gotcha with Veeam is that it can be quite slow to restore if you need to get a LOT of machines back quickly. Reading from Direct Attached Storage with highly compressed Veeanm files we're only seeing approx 12MB/s writeback to SAN in many trials. In event of full DR we'd go to SAN replicas for speed - but for nice easy restore of a few machines or files off machines, Veeam is great.

.

[walibe]

I didn't realise people were still using tape for this sort of volume of data. I agree with the comments of backup exec. It was great 10 years ago but now... I also understand the budget constraints for many companies but most good VM solutions I have seen revolve around two or more Data Centres i.e SANs rather than DAS etc replicating each other. A good starting point would be contacting Dell and see what they recommend. They have a dedicated sales team for such. You don't have to use them afterwards as there are many notable companies that deal with this kind of setup. HP is another one.

If your company already uses anything like ArcSight you probably already have much of the infrastructure required. You can guarantee however, it won't be cheap.

I've not heard of Veeam before so will have a look at that.

[1stRaven]

Veeam is ok but we moved from that to Netapp Snapmirror technologies on our main units. This allows for site to site mirrors for backup but we also write off to a Dell TL2000 library once a week for longer backup periods. We do us Backup exec 2012 and NDMP for this but have some issues with it as it no longer appears to be able to deal with the data volumes that we have. NBU might be our next step.