Backup for Groupwise on Netware

[bagel]

Hello
I have a recently virtualized legacy email system: Novell Groupwise 7.03 on Netware 6.5, 4 servers altogether. vSphere 4.1.

Are there any problems and/or peculiarities when doing Veeam backup for such systems?

Veeam User guide recommends For Transaction-Consistent Backup to Enable VMware tools quiescence option for guest OS other than MS, i.e. Netware. I do not see how can I change options for Netware VMTools...

At the same time there's a paper on VMWare site: Novell Netware 6.5 guest operating system cannot create quiesce snapshots on ESX 4.1 (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1029749) which recommends using the older version (from 4.0) of VMTools in such cases...

I read about file level restore limitations for Netware guest OS, which, I believe, not a big deal in my case.

Any other observations/precautions/recommendations?...

Thanks,

B.

[foggy]

Just to let you know, file level recovery is still possible for Netware OS. According to Veeam B&R user guide (p.39):

File-Level Recovery for Any File System
With the vPower technology, Veeam extends its IFLR to any file system, not just Windows FAT, NTFS and those restored with multi-OS file-level recovery.
This type of file-level restore is not wizard-driven. You should leverage instant VM recovery to publish VMDK from a backup on the vPower NFS datastore (without actually starting the VM). With the VMDK files readily available, you can mount these VMDKs to any VM that can read the corresponding file system (including the original VM), and restore the required files using native OS file management tools. Alternatively, you can mount the VMDK to a Windows VM, and use tools such as Portlock Explorer.

[bagel]

Thank you Foggy; but can you tell me if Veeam can correctly backup servers with Groupwise/Netware with running domain database and post offices? Do VMWare snapshots will work? Any settings in Netware VMtools for that? (if any..) Prerequisits? Scripts, etc.?

Or a dumb VM backup will do the job correctly?.. It is very important for me.

Thank you!

[Vitaliy S.]

VMware snapshots is the only option you could use to backup these VMs. That said, if you install VMware Tools version 4.0 as it is advised by the KB article you've referenced and use pre-freeze scripts then Groupwise/Netware serves will be backed up in consistent state.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with script examples as I do not have enough expertise with Netware servers, but I'm pretty sure there should be sample scripts on Netware community forums, at least it is worth checking them up.

[averylarry]

I had no problems just freezing Netware using the old tools. GroupWise wasn't exacly shutdown "clean", but it's extremely robust and never had any problems coming back up. (I'm assuming you're not using direct access for your clients.)