Avamar with VMware backup /restore

This discussion is now open for questions. Vjay and Dan will be looking in on your questions from tomorrow.

We look forward to a lively and interesting technical discussion.

Best regards,

Mark

Hey everyone. Thanks for stopping by! I want to thank Mark and Ian for the invite. Last year I had the opportunity to build a new Avamar grid and configure it to protect my companies cloud computing solution. http://www.mcloud.ca/

I learned a lot and hopefully I can remember some of those learnings and "gotchas" to help you in your current environment. You can follow me @backupbuddha on twitter and check out my website backupbuddha.ca.

Hello gentlemen,

Thankyou for this forums.

We are currently using Avamar v6.0.1.65 to do image backups or our ESXi 5 environment but don't seem to be able to get the change block tracking working. A 121 gb virtual machine takes about 4 hours to backup each day. What should I look out to fine out why this is not processing faster and using CBT?

That is far to slow. Even without change block tracking the backup should be much faster. In some cases CBT backups can be slow if there are previous VM snapshots that were taken prior. Delete any previous snapshot and try it again.

Thankyou for your reply se7en, there are no outstanding snapshots on this VM.

How much data is actually being moved with each backup?

Between 3 and 4 % of new data according to the Avamar Administrator - Activity view.

The transport mechanism usually determines the backup rate.

Under "Normal" operation, the Avamar proxy "mounts" the snapshot to it's SCSI bus, using the "SCSI Hot Add" feature of vmware. This results in fast disk-speed I/O.

If, for some reason, the "SCSI Hot add" feature does not work, the vmware API fails-over to the slower Network-based transport (Network Block Device or NBD based transport) which is considerably slower.

Look in your avvcbimage log for a message that looks like:

       avvcbimage Info <9675>: Connected with hotadd transport to virtual disk ...

If you don't see "hotadd", you will need to diagnose why that mode is not being selected.

There is a long list of steps to diagnose that, so I will not go there - you can request EMC support for assistance with that.

Vijay

Looking through the log I can see the following,

2012-06-12 12:28:08 avvcbimage Info <9625>: Connected with hotadd transport to virtual disk [SAN-A_R10_VP2_157] sadoc3/sadoc3_1.vmdk

I assume this is what you mean.

Yes - that looks good. Hopefully, it uses HOTADD to connect to each disk the VM has.

If you upload the logs to ftp.avamar.com

  cd   /incoming 

   mkdir Tony1244

   cd Tony 1244

   put (all log files for this backup)

Then please notify me by posting here - I can take a look, and post snippets here, if there is useful diagnostic info.

Vijay, have uploaded the file as requested. When I went to ftp.avamar.com it redirected me to ftp.lss.emc.com and that is where I have placed the file.

I appricate your assistance with this.

Hello,

we have a big project with Avamar and I have some questions about this. Perhaps you can give me some hints for my next meeting with the customer.

The Plan is to deploy some AVE with Datadomain to backup up up to 12 Vblocks (in the future) with each Vblock hosting about 1000VMs.

We want to solve it with AVE and Datadomain as I said.

Open questions are:

1. Customer wants to have 2 NICs on each AVE to get in differend subnets. We tried this out with vlans but this is not the solution the customer wants to see. It is not the problem to add a secound NIC to the underlying linux, but I am not sure what to change in the avamar config files. So I think I have to make a RPQ, but if you have more information about this it would be great.

2. Are there any rules of thumb, for example how much VMs can one AVE handle or some sizing hints how much AVE we need on one Vblock for 1000 VMs. We are thinking about building a "virtual grid" which is not supported I know but I have tried this and it works. So here we have to make another RPQ about this. The grid would be great to handle more streams as the single AVE.

3.Can I replicate only the Metadata with Avamar replication and the rela data which is only on the DDs with DD replication?

Any hints or discussions are welcome.

Re: Vblock 1K Vm backup to AVE+DD

1. Instead of multiple NICs per AVE, how about doing multiple AVEs - 1 per required subnet ?

    This is a supported  configuration, and the DD box is capable of backing up multiple Avamar servers.

    Also - I'm not clear on why multiple NICs are needed in the first place - are these ISOLATED vlans ?

    Avamar Image backup does not require network connectivity to the VM. In fact, it is quite comfortable

    backin-up VMs with NO network. So, this requirement is not clear.

    Sorry - I seem to be generating more questions than giving answers.

2. The number of VM's an AVE can support varies greatly, based on types of VM, hardware speeds, VM sizes and change rates. Since the AVE is equivalent to a small single-node Avamar, I would not be comfortable with more than say 6 simultanious VM backups . If you can get an average GB/hour for a VM backup rate for your hardware, based on the length of your backup window, you can estimate how many GB you can support per AVE, and work from that to figure a number of VM's.

3. The answer is Yes. Avamar/DD pairs can replicate.

    As a part of the replication configuration, you specify which DD device on the target holds data for a particular Avamar client domain.

Vijay

I uploaded the file to ftp.avamar.com via filezilla and it said it was successful but I can't see the file and I am unable to do a dir listing. Do I need an account to create directories and upload files?