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Backup in a Cloud?

thomas_scheid
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Hi,

Backup in a cloud ...

In http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3948.pdf the Backup (Snapshots) are done with Snapcreator.

When in the VM is a Exchange or SQL or something else installed how can the Backup be consistend?

Normaly I say the Snapmanager for Exchange is needed for Exchange. But in a Cloud?

Is there a technical Whitepaper or something how the Backup in the Cloud should do (incl. Application Backup) ? And what is with multi-tenancy and Backup ?

Thanks

1 REPLY 1

datacenterdude
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Thomas,

First off, my apologies for not seeing your question sooner, and if you haven't found an answer yet, let me sum up the solution as a whole.

Currently, SnapCreator's vCloud Director plugin is the only product on the market (that I know of) capable of taking array-based snapshots that are contextually aware of all the layers within vCloud Director (Org, OrgVDC, vApp, VM), and being able to restore at any of those levels.

SnapCreator also has plugins to manage the snapshots of vCenter/vSphere, as well as many other tier1 apps.  Unfortunately, due to some current limitations with VSS, we're having to write some custom code for Exchange and MSSQL in order to not only get them into a quiesced state, but to also roll up their logs.

That said, we do have app-aware plugins for Oracle, Postgres, Domino, DB2, and many others.  These can all be used to quiesce apps in the cloud before triggering a vCloud Director backup. 

For example, if we have an Oracle db running inside of a tenant VM inside of a tenant OrgVDC, we would first put Oracle into HOT BACKUP MODE (i.e. ALTER DATABASE), then snapshot the VM, then take the array snapshot, then unquiesce the VM, then take Oracle out of hot backup mode.  Make sense?

The hope is (and I'm currently a part of the development myself) that we will have this same functionality soon with Exchange native to SnapCreator.

The cool part is that we can use SnapCreator to manage other SnapManager tools.  The current recommendation is to install SnapManager for Exchange into the VM that is running your Exchange MB role, and use that to prepare Exchange.  SnapCreator can trigger this.  Once that is done, we quiesce the VM, and array-snapshot, same as above.

Hope this helps you understand further!

-Nick Howell

@that1guynick

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