Help me spec a backup solution

iaind

iaind

iaind

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Ok guys, here's one to get your teeth stuck into. Apologies for the long post...

I've just about completed a migration from our old servers (DL380 G4s) with local storage and VMWare Foundation to new servers (3 x Sun X4440), a SAN (Sun 2510 iSCSI) and VMware Enterprise.

I now want to turn my attention to how to back it all up. Our disaster recovery is taken care of with DoubleTake Livewire, which replicates all our critical data offsite, so I'm coming at this from a file recovery/local problems/users deleting files point of view.

So here's what I want to achieve:

  • Quickest possible recovery of VMWare system disks
  • File level backup of data volumes
  • Recovery of individual messages from Exchange 07
  • Recovery of individual DBs from SQL 2000
  • Retention of file level data for 14 days
  • Only need to retain system volumes for 1 day
  • Archive of data every month

And here's what I have available:

  • Sun 2510 iSCSI array with HP 2510G switches
  • Backup server - HP DL380 G4 with 6 x 36gb 10k disks
  • Buffalo Terastation Pro 2TB NAS
  • 2 x SDLT320 Tape Drives
  • BackupExec 12.5 with Exchange and SQL agents

Previously I've used the free version of ESXpress to backup the system drives (putting data volumes into independent mode to prevent them being backed up) to the NAS and a script to delete the last day's backups at the end of the day. Then, I've run weekly full backups of the data with BackupExec and daily incrementals to the NAS. Then a full archive to tape every month.

That worked well enough in theory, but there's a few problems. Firstly, there's no free version of ESXpress and with VI4 out soon, I want to move away from that. Plus BackupExec seems pretty poor at media rotation with B2D - if you set a maximum size for a B2D set and configure the job to append/overwrite if no appendable media available, the set fills up and goes offline instead of being overritten...

Ideally I'd like to use VCB as its part of our VI licensing, but I dont have enough space on the backup server to stage all of the VMs. If I used file level VCB, it doesnt capture system state.

So, what would you guys do to meet these requirements, preferably without spending too much (already spent 30k on the upgrade so far, cant imagine much extra would go down too well...:D)

Cheers!
 
Oh, the important bit - we've got just under 1TB of VMDKs in total although the data size of the files/mailbox stores etc totals about 300gb
 
No budget's been set aside for it as having BE, VCP and the NAS, there should be a solution somewhere :)
Dont mind buying something if its a good solution though...
 
Cost, primarily. The NAS we've got should be big enough for 2 Fulls (600gb total) and 10 differentials (about 300gb total) plus the compressed VM system disks so capacity isnt an issue really, its how to get it on there...

Plus, the existing SDLT drives have enough capacity for the monthly archive

I dont mind spending 1k or so on some software or some extra disks for the 380 but I wouldnt want to be spending big bucks, especially as we've already heavily invested in hardware and software for DR

I was tempted to look at the MS Systems Center DPM for the file level stuff, seems to do exactly what we want but I dont think it would support our NAS as a target
 
If you need quick recovery then a disk based system such as a D2D is going to be your best bet. I would have said look at the LeftHand setups, but they are around $25K US to start.
What sort of Recovery Time Objective do you have? And how far back do you need to be able to recover from?
 
Thats why we've got the NAS, performs adequately for our basic needs.

We're only a small business and the systems arent that critical, implementing the replication for DR has taken the RTO and RPO from 2 days each to 1/2 day and 0 loss..

This part of it really is just to account for user stupidity (the file level backups), a bit of a fallback for us (the system images) and compliance (monthly archive). Dont need to go back more than 2 weeks I'd imagine, although we'll probably store tapes for a few years
 
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