Strategy for getting Veeam full backups to tape

[CraigL2112]

Hello everyone –
We’re in the final implementation stage of Veeam here and have run into an issue regarding getting backups off to tape for longer-term retention.
Our software/topology:
Veeam v8 (with the recently-released patch 02)
Symantec NetBackup v7.6.1

HP StoreOnce 4500 Dedupe appliance
HP StoreEver 4048 Tape Loader w/ 2x FC-attached LTO6 drives

Both Veeam + NetBackup servers have dual-port converged adapters in them, so each has two 10GbE and two 8Gb FC links.

StoreOnce also has two 10GbE links as well as two 8Gb FC links.

The Veeam server is zoned into our VMFS volumes, and backups/restores happen at great speeds; absolutely zero complaints here. We do not see any of the weird failures we see with vRanger!

We’re keeping 7 savepoints online, doing traditional incrementals and an Active Full (as per the best practice guide) every Sunday.

We use NetBackup to protect all of our physical stuff – Exchange, SQL, etc. Naturally, NetBackup is zoned into the tape drives, and performance there is outstanding.

Now, we want to shuffle the backups off to tape for long-term retention. We’ve been toying with the idea of simply backing up the NAS share (where the .VIBs and such live) with NetBackup, but we’d be getting all of the incrementals (an extra fulls!) required to keep 7 days online at a time. Really, all we want is one full.

Given NBU is the software that is “in charge” of the tape loader, I can’t see trying to have both Veeam AND NBU control it (and the drives) at once being a good thing, which lead us to the above idea of just backing up the NAS share. We tried this and performance was just OK – we saw maybe 100MB/s throughput.

The only idea we have now is to perform a Backup Copy job to a different folder on the same NAS share (to preserve the dedupe data!) and just have NBU pick that up.

Are we missing something here? Is there another/different/better way we should be tackling this?

Finally.. looking forward to when Veeam gets Catalyst support.. what then? NetBackup would have no visibility into the Catalyst store........

Thanks a ton in advance!

-Craig

[albertwt]

Craig, Thanks for sharing your strategy and plan here.

FYI: I'm also in the same situation as yours, having Veeam Backup Copy repository in remote site and then the files written to the tape using Symantec Backup Exec 15. So it is Disk (First Veeam Backup in DC) to Disk (Backup Copy to Remote Site) to tape(Tape library attached to the same Veeam Backup Copy repository server).

The problem is that using the Forward incremental, the .VIB files directory most of the time is failed to be written to the tape by Symantec, and Symantec now blame Veeam for "holding" the files during the backup copy job, therefore the Writing to tape process has never been succeesful 100% ever since I upgrade Veeam to v8.0

So I'm interested to know what's your strategy here to ensure that the files can be written o tape by 3rd party application not using Veeam.

[veremin]

If 3-party application can't copy files produced by backup copy job due to locks or something, it stands to reason to utilize additional backup job, instead of backup copy one, that is pointed to remote repository and let software archive to tapes the resulting backup files. Thanks.

[albertwt]

If 3-party application can't copy files produced by backup copy job due to locks or something, it stands to reason to utilize additional backup job, instead of backup copy one, that is pointed to remote repository and let software archive to tapes the resulting backup files. Thanks.

Eremin,

The Backup Copy files can be copy paste-ed into different drive, but still I can't backup to tape drive.

[veremin]

It's unlikely that Veeam has some locks on copied files, so, if some 3-party application can't copy those files to tapes, I'd contact their support team directly. Thanks.

[CraigL2112]

Craig, Thanks for sharing your strategy and plan here.

FYI: I'm also in the same situation as yours, having Veeam Backup Copy repository in remote site and then the files written to the tape using Symantec Backup Exec 15. So it is Disk (First Veeam Backup in DC) to Disk (Backup Copy to Remote Site) to tape(Tape library attached to the same Veeam Backup Copy repository server).

The problem is that using the Forward incremental, the .VIB files directory most of the time is failed to be written to the tape by Symantec, and Symantec now blame Veeam for "holding" the files during the backup copy job, therefore the Writing to tape process has never been succeesful 100% ever since I upgrade Veeam to v8.0

So I'm interested to know what's your strategy here to ensure that the files can be written o tape by 3rd party application not using Veeam.

Interesting, we are seeing something similar when our StoreOnce appliances replicate the Veeam backups. We actually had to set replication blackout periods because of this exact issue with the files being held -- HP confirmed this.

At this point, my only idea is, to do a Backup Copy job (within Veeam), let it finish, then have NetBackup pick up that copy, vs. the actual repository that also has the daily incrementals in it.

Thanks for your reply!

-Craig

[chjones]

We also use StoreOnce NAS Shares for our forward incremental and we have it destaging only the full VBK each week to tape.

We use a post script in Veeam that is a Powershell script that take the name of the Veeam job and the path to the NAS Share on StoreOnce and works out what the latest file in the folder is. If it's a VBK then the powershell writes a new backup specification for HP Data Protector which specifies just that VBK to be backed up and then runs it.

Data Protector is a bit easier as all jobs are just text files on the master server (the cell manager) so we can manipulate them very easy. If there is any way to modify jobs in NetBackup via a command line then perhaps you could setup a job template for your destages and then have a script modify the job and configure which VBK file to back up, then execute the job. I'd assume NetBackup would have powershell support, surely.

Just the post backup scripts in Veeam ensures the script is run after Veeam has closed the VBK file so it is never open. The only issue we found in Veeam v8 is that the job waits for the script to complete before marking the Veeam job as complete. Data Protector actually reports the progress of a job you execute back to the console so the Veeam job have to wait several hours or more depending on the size of the VBK, and there is a 15 minute timeout in Veeam for the script to return an exit code, so our Veeam jobs kept reporting warnings. We got around this by using a batch file with a parameter of the Veeam Job Name as the Post-Job Script in Veeam which calls the Powershell and uses that parameter so the powershell can locate the correct backup folder on the NAS.

It's a bit complicated but we don't even have to think anymore, it all just works.