Backing up Isilon file shares

[bcbkupadm]

Hello,
I am looking to backup an Isilon with multiple SMB shares. We are currently backing up through the Filer/Veeam integration. However, it looks like doing this only hits a single node on the Isilon.

Are there any recommendations for backing up the Isilon using the native change tracking using snapshots while load balancing the request across the Isilon nodes?

thank you.

[Andreas Neufert]

It is a matter of DNS and windows DNS caching.
You can try to disable the "Windows DNS Client" service which basically is a DNS caching service that goes against the standard by ignoring the TTL of the DNS systems.


Integration into Isilon specific DNS load balancing technology is coming in v12.1 I think.

[bcbkupadm]

thank you. Do you know which server queries the DNS? is it the VBR or the proxy?

[Andreas Neufert]

I think both.

[andrewfox68]

Hello,
I spent a long time with both Dell and Veeam Support Teams investigating this issue. They were not able to come up with a solution for this, the backup always runs through one node on the Isilon cluster. We even went as far as installing accelerator nodes on the Isilon cluster to try load balancing.

Eventually, we decided to close the calls as we had spent enough time with the issue and the workaround was to create multiple file backup jobs to spread out the times of the backups as the node CPU% usage would spike.

We did install v12 a few weeks ago and the issue is still there but I am glad to hear from Andreas that Isilon specific DNS load balancing is coming in v12.1 (hopefully).

[bcbkupadm]

Thank you for confirming, we ended up doing the same. That indeed seems to work until native load balancing is implemented.