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Avamar with VMware backup /restore
Discussing Avamar with VMware backup / restore with Vijay_(Avamar) and Dan Gauld (@backupbuddha)
Welcome to this EMC Support Community Ask the Expert conversation. This discussion covers Avamar with VMware backup.
Your hosts for this conversation were:
- Vijay_(Avamar), an EMC employee (Avamar) who has a diverse background in IT, including System administration, IT management, Software development (System level, Applications, Databases, Web), VoIP, network administration,Database administration, system security, Microsoft technologies, Linux, and systems support. He has extensive expertise in Avamar clients, virtualization, Microsoft technologies.
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- se7en (Dan Gauld) is an IT professional (Partner) @ Mainland Information System,based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Focused in the area of backup/recovery and data storage for the last 7 years, He has performed numerous assessments, deployments and upgrades for NetBackup, Backup Exec, Networker, Avamar and Commvault infrastructures.
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Being familiar with best practices both specific and general for these environments has enabled him to quickly identify inefficiencies and possible improvements that can be made in technology and process. Experienced in supporting both disk and tape technologies including StorageTek, NetApp, EMC and Data Domain. He writes at backupbuddha.ca about backup recovery for both the enterprise as well as the home consumer.
He hopes someday to retire to his secret underground base surrounded by an army of robot ninjas. You can follow him on twitter @backupbuddha.
Topics covered were :
- Architecture/anatomy
- Backup/restore work flows
- File level restore
- Changed-block tracking
- Greenville (6.1) changes
- Diagnostic and management tools
The discussion was live from the 11th June until the 29th June, 2012 and hosted by Vijay and Dan . Thanks to them both for facilitating a great discussion.
Cheers,
Mark
Druehl1
223 Posts
0
June 14th, 2012 00:00
Re: Vblock 1K Vm backup to AVE+DD
Hello Vijay,
Thanks for your answers.
You are right, the customer has 2 isolated VLANs, so his idea is to have a seperate NIC for each. But i like the idea to have a AVE per VLAN, lets see if the customer likes it too ;-)
I don´t understand what you mean with "backing up VMs with NO network"?
Vijay__Avamar_
16 Posts
0
June 14th, 2012 07:00
What I meant was : Avamar does not require the VM to have ANY network connection.
The backup is completely independent of the network that the VM connects to.
Vijay__Avamar_
16 Posts
0
June 14th, 2012 07:00
Hi Tony -
I noticed you logged-in to the FTP site as "anonymous" , and I can see the directory you created, but I have the same issue - I cannot see the file name.
If you can re-upload and give me the file name, I can access that.
The more common way to upload is to login with the credentials avamar_ftp/anonymous - note that the PASSWORD is anonymous. This puts the upload at a different location that I can browse.
Tony McPhail
11 Posts
0
June 14th, 2012 16:00
Followed your instructions Vijay, still not sure if it has uploaded. File name is sadoc3_log.zip Hope you can find this.
Vijay__Avamar_
16 Posts
0
June 14th, 2012 17:00
Hello Tony:
I finally discovered where your uploaded files were hiding - after I found this piece of information on an internal site:
Anlyzing your file shows that your VM "sadoc3" has 2 virtual disks. Their Backup times and change rates are:
The entire backup had 73599 changed blocks.
On the 5.0 Avamar release, we have found that when there are over ~ 50 K changed blocks, there are diminishing returns to changed-block usage, particularly when there are a number of proxies loading the server with changed-block backups. This issue is particularly acute for the older Gen-3 Avamar hardware with 3TB nodes.
If you expect a continued 15% change rate on the second disk, I would recommend NOT using changed-block bakups for this VM.
Alternatively, backup this VM at a non-peak backup time, when there is not as much contention for processing changed-blocks.
RemikG
5 Posts
0
June 20th, 2012 04:00
Hello
We have problem with restore time of vm's. We have Avamar 6.0.66 and VMware 5.0 Essential,
so we do not have SCSI HOTADD.
SCSI HOTADD is only in enterprise vmware license.
SSLNBD transport is used. It is very slow due to SSL lib problem.
Is it possible (and how) to use not encrypted transport in avamar - I think NBD is faster than SSL NBD.
Vijay__Avamar_
16 Posts
1
June 20th, 2012 07:00
You can use the flag:
--transport=nbd:nbdssl
to specify that you want it to try "nbd" first, then "nbdssl".
This can be specified in either one of 2 ways:
Yes - NBD should speed up the backup somewhat, although not as spectacular as hotadd.
fdxpilot
143 Posts
0
June 20th, 2012 19:00
What's up with Avamar not supporting file level restores from VM GPT or dynamic disks? Neither are new and GPT in particular is becoming more of a standard as large VMs become more common. Also, why does the Avamar backup job complete with no warning that file-level restore will not be possible? Honestly, I'd expect more from a product from a company with a significant stake in VMware.
Also, why is mapping data stores to proxies such a pain? Consider an environment where you have multiple large ESX clusters, each with their own set of datastores. That is an awful lot of configuration and maintenance to keep datastore mapping up to date so backups use hotadd transport mode as often as possible.
Are there any plans to offer auto-discovery capabilities for VMs? Perhaps something similar to the different type of affinities other products offer?
Vijay__Avamar_
16 Posts
0
June 21st, 2012 06:00
The File-level-restore (FLR) partition restrictions all come from vmWare's implementation limitations.
Avamar code basically uses the equivalent of vmware-mount, to mount the backed-up vmdk.
Since the restore restrictions are imposed by vmWare implementation (which may change), the Avamar software does not make a determination of FLR restore at backup time.
Re: Mapping data stores - I agree it could probably be rule-driven to make things easier. I will advise product management of your suffering.
Auto discovery of vm's is in an imminent release.
azanotta
27 Posts
0
June 22nd, 2012 11:00
Hello guys,
I´m trying to perform a File Level Restore from a Image Backup. The problem is that fails after a few minutes with the following message:
avvmwfile Error <0000>: File level restore failed.
I´ve noticed that at the time that the backup fails, the proxy has already dismounted the VMDK.
I suppose there is a time out. If that is the case ... Where is it configured? Can I change this value?.
Thanks and regards.
azanotta
27 Posts
0
June 22nd, 2012 11:00
Se7en,
I don´t have problem with all restores. Only large restores fail.
Do you still think it´s a permissions problem?.
In this case... Where do I check these permissions?
se7en1
55 Posts
0
June 22nd, 2012 11:00
Hi!
What permissions do you have set on the vcenter account?
RemikG
5 Posts
0
June 25th, 2012 04:00
Hi all.
I have problem with file level restore proxy. When I try to restore files from windows wm, the list of files is empty - without any allert or error.
Axionfs and samba works fine - I can access files from proxy.
Where can I find logs or something that can help me to check what is the problem?
se7en1
55 Posts
0
June 25th, 2012 11:00
In vcenter go to administration and roles
You should have created a custon role and it should have the following permissions.
DatStore
Allocate Space
Browse Datastore
Low level file operations
Move Datastore
Remove Datastore
Remove file
Rename Datastore
Folder
Create folder
Global
Cancel Task
Log event
Settings
Network
Assign network
Resource
Assgin virtual machine resource pool
Sessions
Validate sesion
Task
Create
Update
Virtual Machine
Configuration
Interaction
Inventory
Provision
State
Vnetwork distributed switch
create
delete
host operation
modify
move
network IO control
policy operation
port config
port setting
vspan operation
se7en1
55 Posts
0
June 25th, 2012 11:00
Are there specific backups affected? Have you run a manual backup?