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December 10th, 2014 14:00

VDP backup schedules and policies

Hi

We are switching VADP backup to VDP in NW 8.2 & DD backup. As the VDP was promoted by EMC pre-sales agents it was looking very stable and simple backup solution for Virtual environment, that will allows VMware admins or  VM’s owners to take care about backup of their VMs using backup policies (Gold, Silver..) provided by Backup admins…

But when I start  to prepare simple/easy understandable VDP policies for VM admins, it looks not so simple,
furthermore it becomes to be more and more complex...

Our backup requirements is based on only 2 different retention policies
- Daily backup / 31 days retention and  Monthly / 190 days retention -

It looks not so complicated, but above environment requires at least 6 polices
- Initial Full –image
- Initial Full - disk
- Daily – image
- Daily – disk
- Monthly – image
- Monthly – disk

Each of above polices requires at least 2 VMware actions (backup & clone),…

I am just wondering whether is above configuration proper way to fulfil mentioned backup requirements?
What will happen if we get some additional vCentres, and/or some additional retention requests???







December 12th, 2014 00:00

Hi ,

You must deploy 1 VBA for 1 Vcenter

You can create only 2 policies : 1 for daily with 2 actions (bck/clone) and 1 for monthly with 2 actions (bck/clone) with appropriete retention .

You may use only 1 policies with 2 actions (bck/clone) and then using nsrmm in order to change specific ssid retention (for vba backup use mminfo -k ...)

Remember that in order to protect you vba you must create policies for discovery/backup of vba check points.

You can associate VMs with a policies by name,directory,entire esx or entire Vcenter automatically.

You also may decide which vmdks protect or not (DB datafile partition for example)

regards,

-Nicola

December 18th, 2014 05:00

HI mrakM

what you describe seems to be by design :

all backup done during a month ,except the last day of the month, will have a retention period of 32days.

All backups made on the last day of the month will have retention period of 190 days.

So in December you can restore only the backup done on  30 Sep (not other days of September i.e. 10th)

-Nicola

16 Posts

December 18th, 2014 05:00

Thanks Nicola, yes I did also something similar, but as I already explained, the theory is fine, but using it in production is not so simple.

You can create only 2 policies : 1 for daily with 2 actions (bck/clone) and 1 for monthly with 2 actions (bck/clone) with appropriate retention .

But how to scheduled it properly, with separated admin roles.

Let’s have an example:

P1 is policy for daily backup with schedule Daily Incr and retention 32 days.

P2 is policy for monthly backup with (full on last day in month, skip other days and retention 190 days)

At 3rd Sep, we've got 10 new VMs installed and responsible VMware admin assigned new VMs to both P1 and to P2, so all done.

P1 is scheduled for daily backups, recognized new VM and promoted incr. backup to full but only for 32 days.

AT 5TH Sep additional 5 VMs are installed with similar scenario and later more and more

of VMs are being added to the VDP policies

So now you can imagine how your are data protected.

And the best in this example story:

at 15th Oct. 5 VM were decommissioned, and 2 months later some of data which were backed up at 10th. Sep. should be recovered (but these data were backed up only for 32 days?!?)

.

December 18th, 2014 06:00

errata corrige:

mminfo -k -ot -r name,savetime,ssretent

-Nicola

December 18th, 2014 06:00

In addicition:

try from backup server cli :

mminfo -k -c -ot -r name,savetime,ssretent

regards,

-Nicola

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