I am attempting to backup a nightly SMVI snapshot to tape for longer term retention using NetBackup 6.5.3.1 and NDMP v4. Obviously, if I had a choice, I would recommend that the customer use SnapMirror and SnapVault, but they have no off-site NetApp storage systems, so they want to backup one SMVI snapshot per day and send those off-site for a certain period of time just in case. Here are some of the specifics:
- The customer has three volumes that are hold NFS datastore for VMware
- The customer is using SMVI to take snapshots of these datastores every 4 hours and keeping those for a few days
- The customer would like to backup at least one SMVI snapshot per datastore to tape per day for longer-term retention
- The customer is using an automatic snapshot schedule through SMVI, in other words, no script is generating the snapshots
The main problem I am having is that SMVI does not use a static name for snapshots. So, even if I call the snapshot NBU-Datastore-Backup in SMVI, SMVI actually names the snapshot smvi_NBU-Datastore-Backup_<date><time>_<GUID>. Even if I only take one snapshot per day, overwriting the previous days snapshot, the name is different since the date/time and GUID are appended to the snapshot name.
This makes backing up the snapshot via NDMP tricky because backup policies expect a fixed name and NDMP does not support wildcard characters. So, I can't say backup /vol/vol1/.snapshot/smvi_NBU-Datastore-Backup_*, for instance. This is what is causing me BIG headaches. Without being able to use wildcards, how can I do this easily?
Here are a few possibilities I thought of:
- Create a script that wakes up after each datastore snapshot is taken. Have the script determine the name of the snapshot and modify the NetBackup policy through bppllist with the exact name of the snapshot. This can be a pain to maintain for the customer. If they add a datastore, they have to match it up with a NetBackup policy.
- Create a script that creates the snapshot through the SMVI CLI, grabs the name, runs the bpbackup commands, deletes the snapshot. I don't know if this will actually work as using bpbackup is usually intended to run on a client. If it is used from the context of a Master/Media server, I believe you have to have a policy configured, which leads me back to the first solution.
- Create a script that creates a snapshot for each datastore through SMVI CLI, grabs the name, then flexclones the snapshot. NetBackup would use the name of the flexclone as the volume to backup. This seems the cleanest way.
- Mount the snapshot to another system via SMVI CLI. Unfortunately, these are NFS datastores and this would drastically slow down data transfer. The Master/Media server and NetApps are Fibre Channel attached.
Any other suggestions? I can't believe it is this difficult to backup an SMVI snapshot to tape. I must be missing something.
