Offsite Backup Solution Needed
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For ~200GB of changes you're in the butter zone for LTO5/6. Just make sure if you go with 6 you can feed it fast enough as they work best with a full buffer to avoid running out of data mid write.
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@Sparkum It seems the easiest thing to do would be to upgrade the retail site's wan link. If you aren't already using tape, it seems like you should just stay away from it.
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@Dashrender If you are using Veeam, then it handles all of it. You can either use VM replication and that does require a hypervisor on the other end. Or you can use backup copy to replicate the backup.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Yeah so there are a few different items being discussed.
Continuous replication is not a backup. It's an Oh-Shit recovery tool, where you are making a ready to boot copy of everything on a separate host.
- this does not sound like what you want
Backups include
- Full Backups - backing up everything VM related
- Incrementals or Delta's - Only the changes since the last backup.
Incrementals are what you appear to want, but then you mention that you'll have a Hypervisor at the remote location.
So are you doing / hoping for a Continuous Replication and Backup scenario where you use two types of recovery?
Replication most certainly is a backup. It is not backup history that you can restore various things from various times. But it most certianly is a copy of your data.
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@MattSpeller said:
For ~200GB of changes you're in the butter zone for LTO5/6. Just make sure if you go with 6 you can feed it fast enough as they work best with a full buffer to avoid running out of data mid write.
I personally wondering if the ~200GB number I'm coming up with is more how Backup Exec does its backups, looking closely I cant fathem why certain servers have the growth they are showing.
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@JaredBusch Does replication do any sort of snapshot?
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@Sparkum said:
@MattSpeller said:
For ~200GB of changes you're in the butter zone for LTO5/6. Just make sure if you go with 6 you can feed it fast enough as they work best with a full buffer to avoid running out of data mid write.
I personally wondering if the ~200GB number I'm coming up with is more how Backup Exec does its backups, looking closely I cant fathem why certain servers have the growth they are showing.
I've had nightmares about trying to use / fix BackupExec that would scare the underpants off a fully grown sysadmin
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@MattSpeller said:
@Sparkum said:
@MattSpeller said:
For ~200GB of changes you're in the butter zone for LTO5/6. Just make sure if you go with 6 you can feed it fast enough as they work best with a full buffer to avoid running out of data mid write.
I personally wondering if the ~200GB number I'm coming up with is more how Backup Exec does its backups, looking closely I cant fathem why certain servers have the growth they are showing.
I've had nightmares about trying to use / fix BackupExec that would scare the underpants off a fully grown sysadmin
Haha ya for sure, I dont think anyone would disagree that it has its downsides.
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@Sparkum said:
@JaredBusch Does replication do any sort of snapshot?
Of course it does. That is how all backup mechanisms work.
This is what VMWare shows on the source host when Veeam 9 runs a replication job .
and here is what it looks like on the destinaiton side.
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@Sparkum said:
@MattSpeller said:
For ~200GB of changes you're in the butter zone for LTO5/6. Just make sure if you go with 6 you can feed it fast enough as they work best with a full buffer to avoid running out of data mid write.
I personally wondering if the ~200GB number I'm coming up with is more how Backup Exec does its backups, looking closely I cant fathem why certain servers have the growth they are showing.
You can have nearly zero total size change but files themselves could change drastically internally, so that needs to be backed up.
I'm not sure how DB's work, but let's assume if you change even one bit in a DB you have to backup the whole thing - so if it's a 100 GB db, and you change 1 bit, you have 100 GB to backup now.. just a lame example.
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Replication itself doesn't need to involve snap shots though.
You can have Veeam take a backup of the VM to local NAS. Then you can have Veeam, as a different job, replicate that backup over the WAN. That replication won't touch the VM or make a snapshot.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Sparkum said:
@JaredBusch Does replication do any sort of snapshot?
Of course it does. That is how all backup mechanisms work.
This is what VMWare shows on the source host when Veeam 9 runs a replication job .
and here is what it looks like on the destinaiton side.
Ya thats just where my concern is.
Maybe what happened with the VM filling up and crashing is something stupid that I could fix with a simple phone call to Veeam, but like every company we have certain servers that cant have downtime during business hours, so if something like that happened on one of our critical servers shit will hit the fan so fast.
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@Dashrender said:
@Sparkum said:
@MattSpeller said:
For ~200GB of changes you're in the butter zone for LTO5/6. Just make sure if you go with 6 you can feed it fast enough as they work best with a full buffer to avoid running out of data mid write.
I personally wondering if the ~200GB number I'm coming up with is more how Backup Exec does its backups, looking closely I cant fathem why certain servers have the growth they are showing.
You can have nearly zero total size change but files themselves could change drastically internally, so that needs to be backed up.
I'm not sure how DB's work, but let's assume if you change even one bit in a DB you have to backup the whole thing - so if it's a 100 GB db, and you change 1 bit, you have 100 GB to backup now.. just a lame example.
Ya for sure, and we can some "kinda silly" things set up that would need to change like our OMG VIP sql database, backs up as well as does a DB dumb onto our backup server which then backs up again, so the change on our backup server is huge (didnt take that into account in the 100-200GB)
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@Sparkum said:
Ya thats just where my concern is.
Maybe what happened with the VM filling up and crashing is something stupid that I could fix with a simple phone call to Veeam, but like every company we have certain servers that cant have downtime during business hours, so if something like that happened on one of our critical servers shit will hit the fan so fast.
I realize you had a problem with a snapshot, but that is how every single VM backup solution works and is a native function of every single hypervisor out there. You should contact support for either the hypervisor or the backup vendor.
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@Dashrender said:
Replication itself doesn't need to involve snap shots though.
You can have Veeam take a backup of the VM to local NAS. Then you can have Veeam, as a different job, replicate that backup over the WAN. That replication won't touch the VM or make a snapshot.
It is completely impossible to not involve a snapshot.
How do you think the backup was made? With a snapshot. And that information is how the replication job would know what needed replicated.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
Replication itself doesn't need to involve snap shots though.
You can have Veeam take a backup of the VM to local NAS. Then you can have Veeam, as a different job, replicate that backup over the WAN. That replication won't touch the VM or make a snapshot.
It is completely impossible to not involve a snapshot.
How do you think the backup was made? With a snapshot. And that information is how the replication job would know what needed replicated.
correct, but it's a two step process.
- create backup - a) create snap b) copy data to backup repository c) delete snap
- replicate data from repository to remote location
As long as step 1 is done completely locally, you shouldn't have a problem with your snaps.
What we still don't know - and really is important before providing any advice of real value, is why the snaps caused the server to crash - if it even was really the snap that cause it.
i.e. did it run out of disk space? out of RAM(though that doesn't make sense) CPU overload, etc, etc, etc....
One possible story behind the crash - the snap was taken - the copy process starts but takes forever, the local VM host runs out of disk space - VM Host crashes.
But this is only one of many possible situations. In this situation local NAS for repository would solve the problem.
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@Dashrender said:
@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
Replication itself doesn't need to involve snap shots though.
You can have Veeam take a backup of the VM to local NAS. Then you can have Veeam, as a different job, replicate that backup over the WAN. That replication won't touch the VM or make a snapshot.
It is completely impossible to not involve a snapshot.
How do you think the backup was made? With a snapshot. And that information is how the replication job would know what needed replicated.
correct, but it's a two step process.
- create backup - a) create snap b) copy data to backup repository c) delete snap
- replicate data from repository to remote location
As long as step 1 is done completely locally, you shouldn't have a problem with your snaps.
What we still don't know - and really is important before providing any advice of real value, is why the snaps caused the server to crash - if it even was really the snap that cause it.
i.e. did it run out of disk space? out of RAM(though that doesn't make sense) CPU overload, etc, etc, etc....
One possible story behind the crash - the snap was taken - the copy process starts but takes forever, the local VM host runs out of disk space - VM Host crashes.
But this is only one of many possible situations. In this situation local NAS for repository would solve the problem.
Ran out of disk space, what I believe happened is that Veeam was getting ahead of itself creating the backup and the cache just kept growing while the offload was so slow so it just grew and grew then poof.
Unless thats not how it works then nevermind! haha
But ya, definately ran out of space, and I tried a bunch of things, kept failing, deleted the snapshot and poof, worked.
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@Dashrender said:
@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
Replication itself doesn't need to involve snap shots though.
You can have Veeam take a backup of the VM to local NAS. Then you can have Veeam, as a different job, replicate that backup over the WAN. That replication won't touch the VM or make a snapshot.
It is completely impossible to not involve a snapshot.
How do you think the backup was made? With a snapshot. And that information is how the replication job would know what needed replicated.
correct, but it's a two step process.
- create backup - a) create snap b) copy data to backup repository c) delete snap
- replicate data from repository to remote location
As long as step 1 is done completely locally, you shouldn't have a problem with your snaps.
What we still don't know - and really is important before providing any advice of real value, is why the snaps caused the server to crash - if it even was really the snap that cause it.
i.e. did it run out of disk space? out of RAM(though that doesn't make sense) CPU overload, etc, etc, etc....
One possible story behind the crash - the snap was taken - the copy process starts but takes forever, the local VM host runs out of disk space - VM Host crashes.
But this is only one of many possible situations. In this situation local NAS for repository would solve the problem.
I would agree that the snapshot issue would be the first thing to tackle. I would avoid backupexec like the plague and can't recommend Veeam enough. I would also upgrade the connection at the remote site. Then decide how you want to get the data over there- whether you are using replication or backup copy job (both are features in Veeam).
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@Sparkum said:
Ran out of disk space, what I believe happened is that Veeam was getting ahead of itself creating the backup and the cache just kept growing while the offload was so slow so it just grew and grew then poof.
Unless thats not how it works then nevermind! haha
But ya, definately ran out of space, and I tried a bunch of things, kept failing, deleted the snapshot and poof, worked.
Well that could easily be it. If Veeam kicked off additional backups while the first one was still running, if you have very limited space on the host, that would probably explain it.
You can solve that by limiting Veeam to only allow one backup at a time per VM host.
