Netbackup 6.5.2a and VCB 1.5. Need some advices to configure policies

[Jeff_39]

Hey there!

I ran some test on a small environnement (only 4 VM's, 2 hosts and a VC server) with Netbackup 6.5.2a and VCB 1.5, ESX 3.5 U2 and VC 2.5 U2. It all work pretty well but now, we have to move this in a production environnement with a lot more VM and Host. We plan to have 2 Backup Proxy Server with 4 HBA's in each server. Now, the thing is that we have to figure out how to configure the policies in Netabackup to get the maximum of our infrastructure and take as much VM as we can in the same backup window. We have maybe 30 Datastore in separate LUN, 150 VM at this time and I read somewhere that only one snapshot at a time can exist on a VMFS file-system, other snapshot request are put in a queue and VMware recommend not to have too much snapshots request (6 to 10). We plan to do 1 full backup per week and Incremental for the rest of the week.

So if one of you guys had already configured Netbackup for VMware in a large environnement, it would be very appreciated if you can give me some advices on how to obtain the best results with the policies configuration (and maybe explain at little bit more how exactly the Type 3 - Incremental backup works and how it can save backup time).

Thanx a lot!

[kudzu1]

Hi Jeff. Answers inline...

*>> Now, the thing is that

we have to figure out how to configure the policies in Netabackup to

get the maximum of our infrastructure..*

My suggestion would be to align your NetBackup policies with your storage (Datastores). In this way you can control backups as they relate to your Datastores. For example, if you have 5 Datastores and 5 NetBackup policies, you create the each policy so that it only contains VM's that are housed on one of the 5 Datastores. Next, set the maximum number of jobs in each policy to 1. Using this logic you will be running 5 simultaneous backups but only one backup per Datastore. The number I use here are for my example only. If you have a faster Fibre environment and faster storage, you might want to increase the number of simultaneous jobs.

There is a NetBackup for VMware Best Practices guide that can be found here:

http://www.symantec.com/business/products/whitepapers.jsp?pcid=2244&pvid=2_1

You might find it helpful as you set up your environment.

>> I read somewhere that only one snapshot at a time can exist on a VMFS file-system

You can run more than one snapshot at a time per Datastore.

>> maybe explain at little bit more how exactly the Type 3 - Incremental backup works and how it can save backup time

The VM incremental backup technology that was introduced in NetBackup 6.5.2 is described in the following document:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/302438

NetBackup for VMware and the incremental backup technology is described in Chapter 2.

-George Winter

george_winter@symantec.com