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  • 1.  High performance backup to disk -- what are my options?

    Posted Jul 19, 2010 10:59 PM

    Have just arranged purchase of some new virtualisation and storage infrastructure for my organisation. Soon we will have three (3) new Dell R710's with 48GB RAM each to act as ESX hosts, and a new Dell MD3200 with 12 x 15,000rpm 450GB SAS drives, backed up by a Dell MD1200 with 12 x 7,200rpm 2TB nearline SAS mass storage.

    I've been considering several options for offsite backup. Replication isn't an option, and since I have an aversion to tape, I would prefer to take data offsite on disks. Each night, the intention is to use Veeam Backup on my VMs and will store the backups on the SAN. Ideas floated for moving the data offsite are:

    (1) install some extra RAID 1 hot swappable disk storage in the ESX host with the VM running the backups ... copy the data from the SAN to the RAID 1 ... when finished, swap out one of the mirrored drives to go offsite ... then put in the next night's disk into the RAID 1 and rebuild the mirror ... repeat adinfinitum

    (2) purchase and install some 10Gb Ethernet cards, one to the ESX host and the other to a separate Backups physical server ... and move the data from the SAN to the physical host over that high speed network ... copying it to eSATA storage to be taken offsite

    I know one site where #1 is working and it seems to be reliable, but I have my doubts nevertheless ... this seems to be an 'abuse' of the whole concept of hot swappable drives. Option #2 would seem to be preferable.

    Wondering if anyone can suggest other options? I did look into using VMDirectPath and tying the Backups VM directly to some hot swap storage, but it seems that I can't do eSATA with that as best I can tell?



  • 2.  RE: High performance backup to disk -- what are my options?

    Posted Oct 21, 2010 05:53 PM

    Hello FrostyatCBM

    How did you go whit this configuration? Which one did you choose?

    I´m also thinking of doing backup to the storage using another server with SAS or ISCSI (1GB) to the storage and perform backups on a SAS LTO5 Tape Drive of 5 VM and plain data which is around 2 TB. I'm still in the planning stage and I'm not sure about SAS/ISCSI for the storage. I know that SAS is faster that ISCSI, but it is limited to 4 ESX hosts and ISCSI is better for growth.

    How is the performace of the MD3200? have you compared with the IBM DS3512, or HP P2000?

    Hope yuo can help to choose the rite backup option for my environment.

    Thanx,

    AnibalR



  • 3.  RE: High performance backup to disk -- what are my options?

    Posted Oct 22, 2010 03:04 AM

    >> How did you go with this configuration? Which one did you choose?

    We're only part way through the process so far. Our new hardware is installed, but we have run into some unrelated issues with UPS and also our firewall, so I am delaying the changeover to using the new R710s and MD3200/MD1200 storage until those other things are properly in place. You are right about the limitations of shared SAS ... for a small environment like mine (3 ESXi hosts, 15 VMs) its ideal, but for a bigger environment you'd be better with iSCSI.

    My thinking at this stage is to have backups done as follows:

    STEP 1 -- we will use Veeam Backup and Replication v5 Enterprise to take backups of all our VMs and store them on our SAN, probably in some RDMs rather than VMDKs ... as data only moves inside the SAN it should be lightning quick

    STEP 2 -- we will have a separate physical server with multiple USB portable HDDs attached and we will copy the data over the network on to the portable HDDs to later be taken to offsite storage

    I think that is what will work best for us, but whether it will suit someone else I cannot say. But I really do like Veeam's backup product for VM backup, restore and replication

    >> How is the performance of the MD3200? have you compared with the IBM DS3512, or HP P2000?

    I did quite a bit of testing a few weeks ago with the MD3200/MD1200 shared SAS and posted my results/thoughts here:

    http://communities.vmware.com/thread/287838

    You need to read down to about post 3 or 4 before you get the proper conclusions, as my early testing was missing a couple of key factors. Overall I am really happy with the MD3200 and it should blow away the performance I'm getting now from my old iSCSI SAN which is loaded with 7200rpm SATA disks!



  • 4.  RE: High performance backup to disk -- what are my options?

    Posted Oct 22, 2010 03:09 AM

    Oh, and just so I'm being completely clear, my backup strategy is based around the idea that for the vast majority of scenarios, restores will be getting done in my current environment with my current infrastructure in place ... so my first tier of backup is being stored on my SAN so that its instantly accessible and very fast to recover things, whether it be a file, folder, or even a whole VM.

    I then take a 2nd copy of that data offsite for disaster recovery purposes. We don't run a live DR site, so we're not doing replication of running servers or any of that high-powered stuff. So I can take my time to copy the data off on to USB drives and store it at Iron Mountain.