Can I move the VDR backups on to tape?

[hennish]

Hi. I've looked in the FAQ and docs for VDR, but I can't seem to figure out if it's possible to move the backed up VMs on to tape or another type of backup media.

I understand that the "initial" target store for VDR can be NFS, CIFS or other type, and that it keeps a (deduped) history according to the retention rules, but I feel the need to further move/archive these backups off-site and for longer retention.

Is this possible, and if so, can I use my ordinary backup program to back up the NFS/CIFS datastore as regular files, or how would it be done?

[nickchap]

I'm also interested in the answer to this. Alternatively could we run VDR and VCB together and make full VCB backups once a week and VDR backups during the week? There doesn't appear to be much guidance from VMware on this.

Nick

[Dan_Willis]

You can't move VDR backups to tape using VDR - you'd have to use another backup product to do that (VDR does not support tape, nor secondary locations). Just had the chap in from VMWare to tell us this :smileyhappy:

[admin]

Correct, VDR does not support tape, but I am not sure that was the question. Depending on the location of the VDR backup data will depend on what tape solution can be in place. Obviously, if you are backing up to CIFS or NFS, a backup product could come along and send it to tape.

[hennish]

Exactly, but is that data "useable" as is, or would I need to go through a cumbersome three step process or more if I would want to restore anything from a backup that has been backed up to tape and then has expired from the VDR CIFS destination?

Is the CIFS destination possible to backup incrementally to tape, or would we have to back it all up every time we want a tape backup of it?

[at12345]

From what I have tried incremental doesnt work. It looks like subsequent vdr runs touch all of the files so that each time you run a backup of the data store it seems to take everything...

[jbsengineer]

We need the VDR backups for offsite recovery. Not usual file restores so I will actually be trying to utilize VCB to backup the VDR machine to tape. I know i can do it. Just not sure how the restore will react. I'll find out!

Also, this is temporary for us. We are really looking forward to taking advantage of the vStorage API hooks with backup vendors.

[admin]

All

Thanks for the posts - great to see so much discussion on the forums. Some items/clarification

1) As some folks have already stated, VDR does not have native support of any removable media (tape, DVD, etc).

2) All backups are written to disk in a VDR proprietary format (compressed and deduped) - so only VDR can read from this "dedupe store"

3) This dedupe store is effectively a bunch of files running on tthe destination disk's file system - so there are just files and since they all reside in the same directory, they are absolutely transportable/backup-able/move-able. As some folks had mentioned, if the destination is a CIFS share, then any backup/recovery software that can "see" these files will be able to move them to tape. For those of us lucky enough to have replication technology deployed, you should be able to take advantage to replicate the dedupe store to another destination

4) The state of the VDR appliance is also kept in the dedupe store. This means backup jobs, logs, etc are kept, so in the event of a DR scenario, newly provisioned VDR appliance and pointing it to the dedupe store (either existing or restored from media) will return the VDR appliance to the last known state

So here comes the tricky part.......

1) VDR has a concept called a backup window. The little secret is that in addition to backups, we will also perform "housekeeping" of the dedupe store such as integrity checks and deletion of out policy restore points (i.e older than what the retention policy calls). During this time, the dedupe store is "active".

2) In addition, if you are performing restores or bringing backup jobs into compliance, VDR will allow these operations outside the backup window, so again the dedupe store will be "active".

So, if you did want to backup the dedupe store, you will need to ensure that the dedupe store is inactive. The only way to guarantee this today is to power off the VDR appliance.

We are in the process of creating some VDR best practice documents covering a variety of topics - we plan to get this out in the next 30-60 days.

Thanks!

[hennish]

Thanks for your answer. That was exactly what I was looking for!

I'm gonna start some testing at my customer's installation and try to figure out how much retention we will be able to keep on disk. I guess the problem is that if we want to move the oldest backups onto tape we will have to get all of the VDR store onto that tape(s), which is kind of tricky and not very effective.

Would it perhaps be possible to make an "export" feature, that would let the admin export (and later purge) selected VMs/dates onto a separate store for backup to tape?

[admin]

Or better yet, provide a programmatic API that backup vendors can use to backup(and restore) the appliance configuration and data.

[at12345]

And it would be massively helpful to stop touching all of the files in the datastore everyday so proper incremental datastore backups can be taken. That way a daily incremental backup of the datastore should only be the changed blocks rather than everything.

[admin]

I just want to clarify:

1) VDR ALWAYS transfers ONLY the changed blocks once the first full backup of the VM is complete. In addition, when backing up a HW7, there is changed block list that the vSphere kernel provides to us that allows to immediately know which blocks to transfer. Note that while we can backup HW4 VMs, VDR needs to scan the virtual disks everytime to determine the change blocks. But in either case, only the change blocks are transferred and stored in the dedupe store

2) The integrity check of the datastore is exactly that - an integrity check - which is done once the blocks are stored in the dedupe store. It is a check to ensure that the data is stored properly and continues to be recoverable.

[XavierE]

I did this in a lab and it worked for me.

The most important thing is that you must turn off the VDR before you backup the dedupe data.

When you recover your dedupe data from tape, you will have to add the dedupe data in the destinations again.

You may need to run an integrity check as well before trying a backup/restore

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Points will be appreciated