Thanks to Remco, Paul, Daniel, Steve, Bill and Ray for your input. Remco,
As a backup "service provider" I don't get a lot of input into the designs, I'm expected to just take whatever is thrown at me and back it up. This particular customer has got the "VMware Religion" and is virtualizing everything, seemingly without considering whether the box in question is a good fit for virtualization. I could start to rant at this point but I'll spare myself the embarrassment and you the noise. The contract specifies a monthly backup. Images are ok but for a really large filespace you need a big chunk of disk to do the restore and it takes hours just to get one or two files back. Monthly incrementals are a much better option IMHO, provided that they can be done. I'd expect a <1% daily change rate on this disk, but at 10 Million files that is still 100,000 objects a day. If they are like most word/excel docs, they will be changed a number of times in a short period then get left forever, and the deltas get smaller and smaller. I might try subfile and see how it performs. We can always turn it off later. Daniel, Thanks for the Fastback idea. I'm still awaiting recovery point and recovery time objectives for this cluster, and if they are too stringent will consider Fastback. Will Fastback's VSS usage co-exist with other VSS usage? I'm thinking of my monthly incremental here. There is also the problem of needing more disk for the fastback backing store. Steve, I didn't realize the implication that raw disks can't be imaged by VCB backups. But raw disks can be imaged by the BA client, and use VSS for snapshots, so the failover problem solves itself. Bill If I can get hold of the architect I will ask about VDR and VMware failover and why he made those choices. VDR has size limitations as I understand it, and that may be the issue, plus needing more backing store. I'm also not sure that VMware failover is free, or maybe they are just implementing a tried and proven solution. Ray Along with the VMware religion goes consolidation frenzy :) they already have some sort of distributed file space, and obviously there are problems with that hence the move to one single point-of-failure. Good point though. I'm much obliged to you all -- still need a script to snapshot/mount/backup/unmount/delete-shapshot on Win 2k8 Thanks Steve. Steven Harris TSM Admin Paraparaumu, New Zealand.