best practice by using Rubrik to back up CIFS shares

FelixZhou · ‎2021-10-25

we plan to use Rubrik to back up CIFS share. it is big amount of data. Can anyone share your experience?

we are on ONTAP 9.8P5. Currently we have following concerns.

1. Since Rubrik backs up shares from appliance mount points, it will skip all open files and changed files after scanned. this is a big amount of files. is that possible to take a snapshot on NetApp, then back shares from snapshot? How can we make automation on this if possible?

2. we enabled snapdiff V2 and V3, but failed to enable the Rubrik API with SVM's certificate, any idea?

3. we used to back up shares from volumes by ndmp, but now we have to back up data from shares. we created a root share for backup purpose. Not sure if any drawback on this.

4. On NDMP backup, we back up data from snapmirrorr target site, but by Rubrik we are not able to do so, we are currently using SVM snapmirror, we don't have CIFS servers and SVM offline on remote site.

thanks in advance.

Ontapforrum · ‎2021-10-25

I have not used Rubrik but heard a lot about it's tight integration with NetApp APIs. SnapDiff was introduced to provide alternate solution to NDMP, hence there is no need to do NDMP backups if the snapdiff is configured correctly. SnapDiff works at the volume level on the NAS side, hence the backups are faster and data integrity is ensured. Take a look at the notes below.

Interesting observation to note - SnapDiff v2 uses "NFS" for its file access protocol, even when an "application is using SnapDiff to back up data from a CIFS share".

Therefore, a LIF that can be used for SnapDiff v2 calls must have these properties:
Data Protocol Access column indicates nfs,cifs
Management Access column indicates Yes.
If either of these criteria are not met, the LIF will not successfully pass SnapDiff v2 calls.
Make sure that the path of the share (In Rubrik) has the same capitalization as the volume name. Otherwise, it will fail to get volume path for share.

Rubrik NAS backup using SnapDiff.
https://www.rubrik.com/blog/products-solutions/20/1/nas-backup-rpo-changelist-snapshots

Check out this kb:
https://kb.netapp.com/Advice_and_Troubleshooting/Data_Protection_and_Security/SnapDiff/Rubrik_backup_displays_%22Failed_'NETAPP'_'Snapdiff'_metadata_s...

To begin with you can raise a call with rubrik to see if they can help you set this up ?