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Is anyone out there running the Networker server in a VMware (or other VM technology). I was thinking about installing NetWorker on a VM and have a couple of storage nodes as physical boxes. The NW running in VM would not have any clients pointed to it as a storage node, al clients would point to the storage nodes running on physical boxes.
The main reason for this would be for disaster recoverability. I would be able to get the NW server in VM and a physical box as a storage node up and running much quicker.
Any thoughts on this? Is it even possible? Would the I/O be too heavy on the VM even though it is not running any actual backups?
The main reason for this would be for disaster recoverability. I would be able to get the NW server in VM and a physical box as a storage node up and running much quicker.
Any thoughts on this? Is it even possible? Would the I/O be too heavy on the VM even though it is not running any actual backups?
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Posted September 2nd, 2009 11:00
Daniel,
The NW server running in VM would not have any clients that point to it as their storage node. All clients would be config'd to only use storage nodes on physical servers.
In DR use, I would bring up the NW server in VM and a physical storage node.
Why would the NW server need to have at least one device if it's not writing to anything?
The whole reason for all of this is to have a NW server up as quick a possible. My thought was this way I would not have to reload the bootstrap tape and rebuild the indexes since they would be in the VM. The VM would get it's VMDK files replicated/backed-up daily.741
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Posted September 3rd, 2009 01:00
We are now implementing NW 7.4.4 on VMware for same reasons. Server is running on Linux and it has file device for saving bootstraps which are then staged to tape. Our environment is clustered and it has passed cluster tests succesfully. It only takes about two minutes to switch NW to another host and get it running
We have also couple of physical storage nodes running also Linux which will handle all the data traffic.
We are now migrating the client from old Solaris server to this new environment and everything has went well so far.
Message was edited by:
JPS741
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Posted September 3rd, 2009 06:00
JPS - what size is your environment? How large is a full backup for you an how well/fast does it run?741
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Posted September 4th, 2009 02:00
I checked current stats. In the new environment we backup 15TB daily and it will grow to nearly 45TB/day when client migration is completed. There will be about 250 physical clients.
VMware backup server has max 4 2GHz cpus and 8GB memory. Storage nodes have 4 quadcore 2.4GHz Xeons and 4GB memory. Each storage node has 4 LTO-4 drives attached and 8GBit/s LAN trunk.741
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Posted September 13th, 2009 02:00
Hi JPS,
Really nice use of VMs.... I really like the idea of running server in Virtual environment. Will save a lot of time, when the server crashes...
dpinink_silva
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741
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Posted September 2nd, 2009 10:00
But for real, if you're taking big backups, probably the VM will use all resources from the host machine.
And answering your question, yes I have some server running as virtual machines, but only for small environments.