NSS Volumes

[Gostev]

The legal issues have been resolved recently, and as of right now, the ball is on our side. We are now waiting for the required R&D resource to become available, I am not sure when this happens. Thus, I am hesitant to give any predictions at all when it's going to actually make it into the product.

[tjohnsonlcsd]

Gostev,

Thanks very much for the update and I sincerely appreciate your efforts on behalf of Novell/Veeam users.

Can I assume that NSS support is on the roadmap, possibly released as an update?

Lastly, this be part of the Multi-OS FLR?

Thanks so much.

Tim

[Gostev]

It's on the roadmap, but no idea yet how/when this is going to be released. Technically, it will most likely require separate helper appliance (not the one used by Multi-OS FLR), but all of that will be decided closer to actual implementation. Thank you!

[tjohnsonlcsd]

Thanks again, I will post back to the Novell Technology partners list and let them know it is coming.

Thanks for listening, great product!

[tjohnsonlcsd]

One additional question and I fully expect a wait and see answer. Will NSS support encompass NSS volumes on Netware 6.x/OES as well as NSS on SLES/OES backups?

Thanks again for making this happen for Novell and Veeam users.

[Gostev]

No idea yet... and support statement will depend on QC testing results anyway.

[tjohnsonlcsd]

Thanks again.

[wjterveld]

Hi,

We all so are very interrested in NSS volume support! We now have some Novell eDirectory clients with loads of problems to restore files from NSS volumes.
So if this threat could be updated by someone from Veeam with the status that would be great!!

Regrads,

Willem Jan

[Gostev]

Status is unchanged.

[wjterveld]

The legal issues have been resolved recently, and as of right now, the ball is on our side. We are now waiting for the required R&D resource to become available, I am not sure when this happens. Thus, I am hesitant to give any predictions at all when it's going to actually make it into the product.

Meaning this is the last status? If you need any help getting info form or any communications to Novell I will be glad to help you with it since we are a platinum Novell partner looking desperate for a sollution!

[Vitaliy S.]

Correct.

[Don]

As a Veeam and Novell customer I would also really like to see this feature included.

We would then be able to expand our Veeam installation and use it for all of our backup/recovery needs. The lack of NSS support is the missing piece of the puzzle at this point.

[spgsit5upport]

Any more news?

Surely at least the restore process could be done, so the user can specify that it is NSS restore, all options are adjusted (more memory, different OS, different NIC) & only Portlock iso needs to be specified by user

Code: Select all

http://www.portlock.com:88/Public/download/Beta/PBCD/

Seb

[wjterveld]

Hi Seb,

I see in your link to the portlock site/tool that this is all NSS/NETWARE related. But our customers are using the OES2 or OES11 Linux versions.
So it would be nice to have a NSS/LINUX support in VEEAM. Or Portlock.

[divtech]

I've been using Veeam to restore NSS for awhile now. The trick is to have a seperate oes server on hand, called let's say OES-RESTORE (in it's own new tree). When you have the need to restore a file, just do an instant recovery and in the options attach it to the same host that is running OES-RESTORE (must be on the same host).

You would then need to edit the vm OES-RESTORE and add that drive that is located in the mounted veeam-recovery datastore. From there it won't conflict with naming or anything and you can mount the drive in your OES-RESTORE/NPS. The Volume can then be mounted and your files are accessible to you just as if you recovered the offending server. Files can be obtained by logging in with the Novell Client or :8009, etc, etc.

Just last week I did a restore from a server 30mi away by doing the instant recovery, then associating it with our main datacenter (across a double hop 56mb link). It took 8 minutes to restore the student's files, another 2 minutes to reverse the process, with no network degrade.

I have been pushing the have Veeam and Novell talk since Veeam came out awhile back. I am looking forward to the one click file restore, but for now this get's me by. I wait patiently each day for news.

[antman157]

We are patiently waiting NSS supprt as well .... As I had to do a recovery yesterday, so I had to boot the eDirectory server then the VM to restore.

[Mighty O]

How exactly did you get it to work? We are having the same issue trying to get my files back after a successful backup.

I've been using Veeam to restore NSS for awhile now. The trick is to have a seperate oes server on hand, called let's say OES-RESTORE (in it's own new tree). When you have the need to restore a file, just do an instant recovery and in the options attach it to the same host that is running OES-RESTORE (must be on the same host).

You would then need to edit the vm OES-RESTORE and add that drive that is located in the mounted veeam-recovery datastore. From there it won't conflict with naming or anything and you can mount the drive in your OES-RESTORE/NPS. The Volume can then be mounted and your files are accessible to you just as if you recovered the offending server. Files can be obtained by logging in with the Novell Client or :8009, etc, etc.

Just last week I did a restore from a server 30mi away by doing the instant recovery, then associating it with our main datacenter (across a double hop 56mb link). It took 8 minutes to restore the student's files, another 2 minutes to reverse the process, with no network degrade.

I have been pushing the have Veeam and Novell talk since Veeam came out awhile back. I am looking forward to the one click file restore, but for now this get's me by. I wait patiently each day for news.

[divtech]

At what point are you getting hung up?

[Mighty O]

We have just moved to Suse 11.1 and are having an issue when bringing the VM back up to retrieve files. All of the drives that are apart of the VM are not mounted it will not let up mount the disks in any environment.

[tjohnsonlcsd]

I see that he last status on NSS support from Veeam is from 1/17/2013. I have been hearing a lot about the new features of B&R 7 and the countdown but nothing about NSS support. Is there any chance whatsoever that NSS support is coming in version 7?

Are Veeam/Novell customers just going to be waiting patiently and in the end just not get NSS support because Microsoft has a bigger market share?

I am not trying to be rude but there seems to be a loyal following of Veeam users that run Novell and I am sure a lot of people would be willing to beta test such a feature.

Please do not forget the customers running Novell/NSS.

Thanks.

Tim

[Gostev]

Thank you for your patience, Tim.

We have a prototype for this functionality in the internal beta for a few days now, so far have only heard from one beta tester, and the feedback was positive. Once we are reasonably confident in the current code, I will make it available in this topic for a sort of public beta.

[divtech]

I would be more then happy to be a beta tester.

[divtech]

Fixed

[spgsit5upport]

Thank you for your patience, Tim.

We have a prototype for this functionality in the internal beta for a few days now, so far have only heard from one beta tester, and the feedback was positive. Once we are reasonably confident in the current code, I will make it available in this topic for a sort of public beta.

Would most gladly do it, as now I have all my NSS volumes fully backed up by Veeam (due to having enough backend storage)

Seb

[Gostev]

I am glad to announce public beta for Novell NSS FLR.

How to:
1. Download the NSS FLR helper appliance here
2. Rename existing drv-va.iso file in the B&R installation folder
3. Save the downloaded ISO in place of existing.
4. Start Multi-OS FLR wizard, and pick a VM with Novell NSS file system.
5. Perform FLR normally.

On top of internal testing (basic NSS delpoyments), this appliance has been successfully tested in one real production environment with Novell OES 2 (Linux) and Netware 6.5 (classic) VMs. However, it may very well "completely not work" in some scenarios, so be prepared for that.

In case it does not work for you:
1. Make sure you installed ISO correctly (according to the instructions above).
2. Make sure you are selecting a VM with NSS file system.
3. Open a case and include [nssbeta] in the beginning of issue description for correct log routing.

Thank you for your help!

[divtech]

Thanks Gostev, you made my week! I'll set it up in the morning and see how it goes.

Best news ever.

[divtech]

Okay, I couldn't wait. I did the dragged the new iso in and ran two operations to test.

1-Ran a FLR on NSS from our core datacenter, the FLR came up in about 6 minutes and did the recovery without any wait. Work flawlessly, I closed the FLR explorer and it unregistered itself without residue.

2-Ran the FLR from our core and selected a vm via proxy at one of our remote sites. It came up in 8 minutes, and worked the same, you couldn't tell it was across a double hop ptp 56mb link.

I recovered a bunch of files and some folders, browsing the file structure was smooth.

The FLR was perfect, Thanks again!

[tjohnsonlcsd]

Tested on SLES10.4/OES2.3 VM with 1 TB data disk. Worked flawlessly, volume showed up under LVM tree in the FLR.

This will not restore NSS rights, however, that is fie as we usually do not rely on restore for file or directory level rights.

This may be a separate issue and I can start another discussion for it but not sure if it is related to NSS support or B&R in general.

My test VM had 1 TB vmdk, on an iSSCI datastore, is thin provisioned (on VMware not on iSCSI side). The volume has 182 GB of data, however, when I backup the VM I get a ~700 GB vbk file?

Like I said maybe not related to NSS but I though I would ask.

Thanks again for getting NSS support going.

Tim

[foggy]

My test VM had 1 TB vmdk, on an iSSCI datastore, is thin provisioned (on VMware not on iSCSI side). The volume has 182 GB of data, however, when I backup the VM I get a ~700 GB vbk file?

Not related to NSS, indeed. Most likely your test VM is full of "dirty" blocks belonging to deleted data, which are treated as occupied ones. Zeroing these unused blocks will eliminate the issue.

[tjohnsonlcsd]

That is weird because this was a newly created LUN, newly formatted VMFS-5 datastore and a new NSS volume. Any suggestions on a safe way to zero the unused data? I could Storage vMotion to another LUN but I would like to avoid that if possible.

Thanks.

Tim