We use largish NFS data stores (mostly on NetApp) for our ESX servers & have had good results just taking raw dumps of the most recent snapshots. For stuff that we're more concerned about consistancy (SQL, AD etc) we dump using their native tools to an extra disk attached to said VM.
It has worked quite well for us (been like this for 8 years now). Never had trouble restoring something even though we're not doing any voodoo on the client OS side to ensure consistency. Maybe we're just lucky although with the LARC/NVRAM I think this is a reasonably safe thing to do. No flexclone'ing involved. Now if my guys would just get comfortable mounting VMDK snapshots (RO) on the loopback so they could do single file restores with out restoring the entire VMDK file... ________________________________ From: tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org [tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org] on behalf of Adam Levin [levi...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 10:04 AM To: Ray Van Dolson Cc: tech@lists.lopsa.org Subject: Re: [lopsa-tech] backing up your VMs At the moment we are using the native tools too. We are looking into doing the *really important* MS SQL systems with our Actifio appliance, but so far we haven't done enough testing for me to form an opinion, and it's certainly not a cheap solution. :) -Adam On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Ray Van Dolson <rvandol...@esri.com<mailto:rvandol...@esri.com>> wrote: Curious what your approach with the SQL VM's are. We've struggled getting this right w/ CommVault. Backups are consistently fast, but restore speeds can vary *wildly* (whereas other datasets don't seem to have this variability). Our DBA's are pferring to stick with the native SQL backup/restore tools as they seem to get better performance there. On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 09:57:51AM -0400, Adam Levin wrote: > Thanks, this is what we were thinking of doing, so it's good to hear > it's working for others. I'm hearing from vendors that 50 VM's per > datastore is a good number. We were hoping for larger datastores > (most of our VMs are Windows <50GB or Linux <100GB), but that would > probably end up with too many VM's to handle effectively. > > I'm thinking weekly quiesced backups and daily basic snapshots would > probably work well. We have a bunch of MS SQL VM's -- they need > special handling, naturally, but they have their own datastores > anyway. > > -Adam > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Ray Van Dolson > <rvandol...@esri.com<mailto:rvandol...@esri.com>> wrote: > > Yes, we still do quiesce the VM's -- but perhaps avoid some of the > issues you've seen by having more numerous, smaller FlexVol datastores > (usually around 5TB max). We had to work with our Compute team to kind > of re-work things to accommodate backup workflows to minimize > disruption. > > I'd guess there are on average around 50 VM's per volume. All are not > necessarily backed up, so the backup footprint is fairly distributed > across volumes. > > Note: We do complement this by having a couple days worth of "dirty" > (e.g. non-quiesced) storage snaps of each volume. In practice this has > worked well for spot recovery. System typically boots up as if it had > crashed which we've found is typically fine for all but the most > sensitive workloads. Then we can just FlexClone the volume to get > things back up and running quickly and Storage vMotion the "recovered" > VM out. Please be advised that this email may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify us by email by replying to the sender and delete this message. The sender disclaims that the content of this email constitutes an offer to enter into, or the acceptance of, any agreement; provided that the foregoing does not invalidate the binding effect of any digital or other electronic reproduction of a manual signature that is included in any attachment.
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