Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
Post Reply
jesseiscanadian
Novice
Posts: 3
Liked: never
Joined: Apr 01, 2013 9:12 pm
Full Name: Jesse Short
Contact:

Setup Surebackup for a multi-domain hosting "Private Cloud"

Post by jesseiscanadian »

Hi everyone

First off, i am pretty green with Veeam, but slowly getting there

I have currently been tasked with getting our production environment up and running with the ability to use the U-AIR wizards for simple file restores. Currently i am backing all our hosted VM's using the basic backup job, using app-aware processing. It works, but it's obviously a pain in the ass to restore individual items from Exchange and SQL.

Now the tricky part i am trying to wrap the design around, we are hosting multiple company's VM's on our ESX cluster. As an example

Company A has 4 VMs total - DC01, EXCHANGE01, SQL01, RDS01
Company B has 3 VMs total - DC01, EXCHANGE01, RDS01
Company C has 10 VMs total - DC01, DC02, DC03, EXCHANGE01, SQL1, SQL2, RDS01, RDS02, RDS03, RDS04

Company A is using approx 2TB of datastore space, B is using 500GB, and C is using 3TB

I have a single Veeam B&R server hosted on a subnet that has access to everything else, i am using a high end NAS device as a backup target. The Veeam server is hosted on the same cluster as the machines it is backing up, with it's own resource reservations to allow some flex during after hours. This server is currently backing up approx 35 servers total nightly.

And finally, each network is of course segregated as well as they use different subnets, A is on 10.13.13.X, B is on 10.13.14.X, and C is on 192.168.168.X. The Veeam server and it's resources are on 10.13.10.X.

As you can see we have many exchange and SQL servers that need to be using surebackups, and they are all on separate networks. I need to find the shortest path to success here. Again, the big target is to have the ability to use the U-AIR wizards to restore individual chunks of data if the customer requests it.
I understand the requirements for Surebackups are Labs and Application groups. First big questions would be, do i need to create multiple application groups and labs? Essentially one lab per company, and one application group per pairing (like DC01 and Exchange01 for email, and DC01 and SQL01 for sql).

based on that, if i need to create multiple labs, will i need separate temp datastores for each one? or only if i plan on running two surebackup jobs at the same time?

Hopefully this is enough information to get some basic feedback, anything else needed that i have missed, please let me know.

Thank you everyone for your help
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Setup Surebackup for a multi-domain hosting "Private Clo

Post by Dima P. »

Hello Jesse,
The map looks perfect for me, and the questions are reasonable!

From my point of view I have one question do you need isolated lab to be connected to production or not. In case you do - then the only solution is to create multiple labs for each company and link it to each production network. If the only thing you need to do is to test backup inside the lab with the appropriate application group - you may have one or two labs depending on you multitasking. In the second case you would need each time adjust the setup of each lab: change app group for example.

So each solution seems to be ok, you just need to figure out what is better for your set up.
Cheers.
veremin
Product Manager
Posts: 20270
Liked: 2252 times
Joined: Oct 26, 2012 3:28 pm
Full Name: Vladimir Eremin
Contact:

Re: Setup Surebackup for a multi-domain hosting "Private Clo

Post by veremin »

Additionally, I’m wondering what version of Exchange server is being used in your environment.

Thanks.
jesseiscanadian
Novice
Posts: 3
Liked: never
Joined: Apr 01, 2013 9:12 pm
Full Name: Jesse Short
Contact:

Re: Setup Surebackup for a multi-domain hosting "Private Clo

Post by jesseiscanadian »

v.Eremin wrote:Additionally, I’m wondering what version of Exchange server is being used in your environment.

Thanks.
Hi Eremin, we are running, in each case, Exchange 2010 Standard SP3. Additionally our SQL varies as some of the VM's were P2V conversions so they have all the way back to SQL 2005 Express installed.
d.popov wrote:Hello Jesse,
The map looks perfect for me, and the questions are reasonable!

From my point of view I have one question do you need isolated lab to be connected to production or not. In case you do - then the only solution is to create multiple labs for each company and link it to each production network. If the only thing you need to do is to test backup inside the lab with the appropriate application group - you may have one or two labs depending on you multitasking. In the second case you would need each time adjust the setup of each lab: change app group for example.

So each solution seems to be ok, you just need to figure out what is better for your set up.
Cheers.
Hi Popov, thanks for the confirmations!

As far as having Labs in the production networks, it would simply be used to allow surebackup to verify jobs, and to allow U-AIR recovery. If i am reading correctly...
-Creating two labs would allow two Surebackup jobs to run at once
-If i needed to run U-AIR recovery, i would need to alter the networking settings for the lab to be used to match that of the production network i am recovering to? (this would also require specifying the app group needed for the restore needed?)

Thanks again for the prompt reply! :D
veremin
Product Manager
Posts: 20270
Liked: 2252 times
Joined: Oct 26, 2012 3:28 pm
Full Name: Vladimir Eremin
Contact:

Re: Setup Surebackup for a multi-domain hosting "Private Clo

Post by veremin » 1 person likes this post

Hi Eremin, we are running, in each case, Exchange 2010 Standard SP3.
In this case, I’d recommend utilizing a free tool called Veeam Exchange Explorer, which allows you to browse conveniently Microsoft Exchange database files and restore necessary items, such as folders, mailboxes, messages, tasks, contacts and so on. This kind of utility is great for doing granular level restores of emails, and can be applicable in a multitude of environments.

For more information please see corresponding User Guide (p.303).

Hope this helps.
Thanks.
jesseiscanadian
Novice
Posts: 3
Liked: never
Joined: Apr 01, 2013 9:12 pm
Full Name: Jesse Short
Contact:

Re: Setup Surebackup for a multi-domain hosting "Private Clo

Post by jesseiscanadian »

v.Eremin wrote: In this case, I’d recommend utilizing a free tool called Veeam Exchange Explorer, which allows you to browse conveniently Microsoft Exchange database files and restore necessary items, such as folders, mailboxes, messages, tasks, contacts and so on. This kind of utility is great for doing granular level restores of emails, and can be applicable in a multitude of environments.

For more information please see corresponding User Guide (p.303).

Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Thank you Eremin, i just finished giving this app a look at for the 2010 servers i think this will be the easiest option without a doubt. Sadly, after plugging through servers i have realized that two of the servers are actually Exchange 2007, so i guess U-AIR is the only option for those.

I have scheduled my SureBackup jobs to run this weekend to verify the backup jobs for half a dozen of the larger server groups. On Monday i will give it a go and see how it works. I Increased the "Lab Data store" to a TB and have allowed both Labs to share the same data store, it should be plenty of space to run both jobs at once as i have it set to only allow 2 concurrent Vm's per Surebackup job.

Hopefully it all works as expected, one big "lightbulb" moment i had was that the surebackup job isn't actually a backup job itself, just a verification job of sorts (hope i am finally clear on that). Because of this i plan to simply run all the Surebackups on the weekend to allow the least impact on IO and other resources, and i'm guessing this should allow for U-Air recoveries if needed.

Cheers
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: tm67 and 65 guests