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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
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Posted June 11th, 2012 09:00
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.
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Posted June 11th, 2012 18:00
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?
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Posted June 11th, 2012 20:00
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.
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Posted June 11th, 2012 21:00
Thankyou for your reply se7en, there are no outstanding snapshots on this VM.
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Posted June 11th, 2012 21:00
How much data is actually being moved with each backup?
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Posted June 11th, 2012 22:00
Between 3 and 4 % of new data according to the Avamar Administrator - Activity view.
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Posted June 12th, 2012 11:00
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.
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Posted June 12th, 2012 17:00
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.
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Posted June 12th, 2012 17:00
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.
Mabro1
2 Intern
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666 Posts
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Posted June 10th, 2012 04:00
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