vSphere 5

simonprr · 24 Nov 2011 at 21:47

Who's got a vSphere 5 environment they look after?

Building one for the company I work for at the moment.

If you do use it at your company, what SAN storage do you have and what software do you use for backups?

Cheers

Edit: Actually vSphere 4 too....

m4cc45 · 25 Nov 2011 at 07:35

We use around 30 TB of SAN space shared between several hosts and DR. We use Veeam to back it up and then TSM the backup the Veeam images to tape.

M.

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 10:44

Cool, for interest what SAN do you use?

What do you mean by "TSM"?

mrbios · 25 Nov 2011 at 11:04

vSphere 4 here, Relatively small deployment, 5 hosts, 30 VMs hosted on an Eonstor A16E-G2140 box

Currently using backup exec for backups but i wouldn't recommend it, hoping to switch to something better soon.

rainbow6six · 25 Nov 2011 at 11:09

vSphere 4 here, 7 hosts on approx 2TB of SAN (Dothill boxes with IPStor front end) with 40 VM's. Have a DR site too. Use Networker 7.? to backup the VM's.

clade · 25 Nov 2011 at 11:32

we use vsphere 5 here. 2 HP GL hosts with a broadberry SAN. PHD virtual to backup.

PHD virtual is not a bad bit of software it is very simple and gets the job done. Belive there is a free trial on their website.

droyden · 25 Nov 2011 at 14:04

veeam here, with a vsphere5 environment, be aware that veeam doesnt "officially" support 5 - and restores dont work without the hotfix. Veeam v6 will fully support it and is due soon I believe.

edit: no san but its in the forecast for next year.. hopefully

growse · 25 Nov 2011 at 15:09

Silly question: why use Veeam (or similar) over and above simple LUN snapshots / backups? What exactly does it get you?

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 16:10

Thanks for the replies people

droyden said:
veeam here, with a vsphere5 environment, be aware that veeam doesnt "officially" support 5 - and restores dont work without the hotfix. Veeam v6 will fully support it and is due soon I believe.

edit: no san but its in the forecast for next year.. hopefully

Actually Veeam does work with vSphere 5 and SAN Transport mode backups with a hotfix you can obtain from support. I've been trialing it because for some reason Backup Exec 2010 R3 (latest version) with SAN Transport mode backups is slow. Raised a support call but haven't got anywhere yet! :rolleyes:

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 16:11

growse said:
Silly question: why use Veeam (or similar) over and above simple LUN snapshots / backups? What exactly does it get you?

Well, if you get it working with SAN Transport mode then the backups pull the data directly from the SAN and won't impact your ESXi hosts (and running VMs) and therefore should be better performance (especially if you have a 10GBE iSCSI network like we do) plus will allow you to restore individual files/dbs etc from within the VMDKs and do change block monitoring etc.

Shaz]sigh[ · 25 Nov 2011 at 16:17

growse said:
Silly question: why use Veeam (or similar) over and above simple LUN snapshots / backups? What exactly does it get you?

A snapshot isn't a backup, if you lose the source, you lose your data. In addition, Veeam also can provide application consistency through VSS. Finally, you don't get the COFW performance hit of using snaps (nor the WAFL chugging).

Shaz]sigh[ · 25 Nov 2011 at 16:21

simonprr said:
Well, if you get it working with SAN Transport mode then the backups pull the data directly from the SAN and won't impact your ESXi hosts (and running VMs) and therefore should be better performance (especially if you have a 10GBE iSCSI network like we do) plus will allow you to restore individual files/dbs etc from within the VMDKs and do change block monitoring etc.

CBT is a mechanism within VADP, not something you do. It's what Veeam tries to hook in to to ensure the quick backups (essentially journalling).

As a matter of interest, do you actually use Direct SAN Access? If so, is it on a physical box?

Virtual appliance mode is how I've always deployed it which is akin to Avamar/Networker proxys (or in the olden days, hot-add).

Regarding LAN/SAN backup, the argument was sound when it was 4Gb FC and 1GbE, now, with 8Gb FC/10GbE it's pretty much the same, you just skip the OS layers.

#Chri5# · 25 Nov 2011 at 16:52

Shaz]sigh[;20648667 said:
A snapshot isn't a backup, if you lose the source, you lose your data. In addition, Veeam also can provide application consistency through VSS. Finally, you don't get the COFW performance hit of using snaps (nor the WAFL chugging).

IIRC...

Plus Veam will backup your VM and then fire it up in a sandbox environment to check it boots and runs as expected.

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:10

Shaz]sigh[;20648706 said:
CBT is a mechanism within VADP, not something you do. It's what Veeam tries to hook in to to ensure the quick backups (essentially journalling).

As a matter of interest, do you actually use Direct SAN Access? If so, is it on a physical box?

Virtual appliance mode is how I've always deployed it which is akin to Avamar/Networker proxys (or in the olden days, hot-add).

Regarding LAN/SAN backup, the argument was sound when it was 4Gb FC and 1GbE, now, with 8Gb FC/10GbE it's pretty much the same, you just skip the OS layers.

Yes, Direct SAN aka SAN Transport. Yes I have a physical Windows 2008 R2 server with the LUNs mounted using a 10GBE NIC to the iSCSI switches.

Even though the performance of Veeam using this method is 10 times better than Backup Exec, it's still not as good as a backup I have of a physical SQL Windows Server that is directly connected to the backup server by 10GBE. I get about 26% of the 10GBE NIC around 13000MB/min!

and thats local SAS RAID 5 storage. I should be getting at least that when backing up the VMs on the SAN cause the SAN performance is so much better.

I wondered if some people don't mind running a benchmark or two if they can. If I run one from within a VM which is on SAN it can achieve read speeds of around 600MB/sec!

Will post some soon.

droyden · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:17

simonprr said:
Thanks for the replies people

Actually Veeam does work with vSphere 5 and SAN Transport mode backups with a hotfix you can obtain from support. I've been trialing it because for some reason Backup Exec 2010 R3 (latest version) with SAN Transport mode backups is slow. Raised a support call but haven't got anywhere yet!

As I said, it backs up fine under vSphere5, but doesnt restore without the hotfix

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:25

droyden said:
As I said, it backs up fine under vSphere5, but doesnt restore without the hotfix

Ah ok, I couldn't get the SAN transport backup to work at all without the hotfix!

m4cc45 · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:54

simonprr said:
Cool, for interest what SAN do you use?

What do you mean by "TSM"?

Sorry we use an IBM SAN - TSM is also a product by IBM which is basically an enterprise tape backup solution. We have a massive tape library - holds around 300 tapes or so.

M.

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:59

m4cc45 said:
Sorry we use an IBM SAN - TSM is also a product by IBM which is basically an enterprise tape backup solution. We have a massive tape library - holds around 300 tapes or so.

M.

Cool, we have a Dell TL4000 which is basically a re-branded IBM autoloader. Only holds 48 tapes but we have 4 x LTO 5 drives which are nice

Nikumba · 25 Nov 2011 at 18:08

ESXi 4U1, with about 32Tb of storage over 4 lefthands with one being at a DR site that we snap shot to, backed up to take with BackupExec 2010R2 due to goto R3 shortly

Kimbie

simonprr · 25 Nov 2011 at 19:43

Nikumba said:
ESXi 4U1, with about 32Tb of storage over 4 lefthands with one being at a DR site that we snap shot to, backed up to take with BackupExec 2010R2 due to goto R3 shortly

Kimbie

What mode of BE backups do you use?