Dell NetWorker 19.9 Administration Guide

Backing up distributed file systems

With this feature, you can support the protection of large-scale distributed file systems like GPFS and Lustre using NetWorker. You can perform backups across multiple physical clients, each of which protects a subset of the high-level directory structure of the distributed file system. Client file indexes that are generated from all the configured NetWorker clients is then consolidated under a single global index client known as the index host.

You can use this global index name to browse the entire file system and perform the recover. All the index entries and media entries that you create as part of these backups must be regarding the index host. Synthetic full and virtual synthetic full backups work seamlessly with index host. One or many NetWorker clients can have the same index host. If the index host is changed or removed from a NetWorker client, the subsequent backup is a level full backup indexed accordingly under the new index host client or that client itself.

You can view the backup of an entire file system from a single place instead of manually mapping the directories. This is useful while performing the recovery. For recovery, an individual client must have remote access permission from global index client.