Backup Virtual Machines to D2D idea

[peter1965]

Hi,

just looking for some ideas to this rather simplistic scenario..

I have a 6280 and a v6210.

On our 6280 we have our production data, virtual machines, exchange 2010 and some sql. We typically use commvault to backup all of our virtual machines from the 6280 (daily incremental snaps then fulls on friday) then commvault would take that data and move it to the v6210 and from there goes to tape for longer term.

We use NFS for our esxi4.1 environment. However we have many "dev/test" virtual machines. I no longer want to back up those VM's using commvault. So what I thinking on doing is creating different NFS datastores and only these dev/test boxes will reside in there. I have VSC installed. So I figured I can snap these machines within these datatstores maybe once or twice a week. and let the snapshots die off after a few days. Another thought is what if I moved or snapped those machines off to the v6210 for longer term backups. What are the thoughts and methods would you use.. We have essentially every license on our v6210 and FAS6280. But these machines do NOT need to be on tape and was wondering how i can move the data off efficiently from the 6280 to v6210 and of course what to do just incase of a restore.

thoughts? hints ? tips?

thanks

[aborzenkov]

This all sounds quite sane, but in the end depends on your goal.

Local snapshots give you protection against logical errors or operator faults. If all VMs vistual disks are located on the same volume, volume snapshot gives you crash consistent backup. For “not so important” VMs it could be enough. To have more confidence in recoverability you could use something like SMVI to ensure data consistency before snapshots are created.

If you need protection against physical data loss, you will need to create secondary data copy on tape or another storage. In case of NetApp the obvious method is to utilize SnapVault, which is D2D backup tool for NetApp environment.

Incidentally Commvault have very good support for NetApp, including snapshots of virtual clients and SnapVault, D2D(2T) and is perfectly capable of doing everything you described. What is your goal? Do you intend to free some CV licenses?

[peter1965]

Yes the goal is to free licenses and cut off some of the time it takes to backup.

[peter1965]

Also - Since we use NFS datastores the temptation to make bigger datastores is tempting. But I was also curious how big are pople making there datastores and also would it make more send to have smaller but more datastores for the virtual machines? How many virtual machines are people having in each datastore? I suppose i am looking for efficiency as well.