Solaris agent 2.1 - Thanks Veeam!

[tehinternet]

I finally got around to trying this agent on a couple hosts recently. Wow it is a drastic upgrade in terms of usability!

Being able to save directly to a Veeam repository is huge. That is one reason why we weren't even using Solaris agents with Veeam because we'd need to go through a round-about way to get the data to out backup server (we're purposely not using SAMBA on Solaris so our options were limited).

Also, understanding what the backup is doing and how it works is much easier and works more like a normal Veeam backup.

It is a little command line parameter heavy. My personal preference would be more using a config file where the user selects the various options for jobs and getting to the repository. But running everything via veeamconfig command works too.

Also, being able to see the agent run via the Veeam B&R console was a pleasant surprise too.

Anyway, I just wanted to give the Veeam dev team some props for supporting Solaris and coming out with a MUCH BETTER version of this agent.
Thanks!

[Gostev]

Thanks Mike for your kind words! More goodness to come in the next major release from @PTide and the dev team behind our Unix agents! In the works we have bare-metal recovery and the ability to manage agents from Veeam Backup & Replication console.

P.S. It was not an upgrade actually, but rather a complete re-write first version of this agent was an OEM from Cristie, since we were not sure what kind of traction we would see. But whenever there is demand, we like to develop stuff ourselves, as this makes it much easier for us to support and integrate into our data protection platform.

[tehinternet]

@Gostev and @PTide Great to hear. Those other future things you mentioned -- bare metal recovery and managing the agent via B&R, those were about the only limitations I could see. I was mentioning those with my coworkers, but will be happy to mention to them that they might be coming.

Oh, a couple other items of feedback:
- In the user guide, in the limitations section, it does mentioned that extended attributes on ACLs are not backed up. That is something we are using at our location to give more usability to our files/directories on Unix. But usually since we're restoring a single file for a user, rebuilding the attributes isn't the worst thing in the world, but does eat up some time.

-The only reason we have one of your competitors products around still, NetBackup, is because it also supports Solaris 8 and 9. Also it supports OpenVMS (Vax). These are all things we unfortunately have in-house and still need to back up. We have these because we've built software for customers off these environments and offer customer support "forever", so as long as our company exists, we're looking to back these up.

I understand if the answer is 'no', but adding support to older Solaris and OpenVMS would be huge for us.

Thanks again! Keep up the great work.
-Mike

[PTide]

@tehinternet,

Thank you for your feedback Mike, dev team was quite happy to hear that : )

As for ACLs - it is doable and is on our roadmap already.

Regarding older Solaris versions - do you need to just save a bunch of files (configs, DB files, and such) and therefore a simplistic file-level backup will do, or you want to have a full-blown BMR?

Thanks!

[tehinternet]

Hi @PTide

That's great to hear about ACLs support in the potential future. I would definitely be updating our agents for that support.

As for older versions of Solaris, I checked with my team and file-level support would maybe be okay. It's better than nothing and if available we'd seriously take a look at it. But also for these older Solaris machines they might have more potential to die with hardware failure and BMR for this older equipment is actually a little more important to us than some of the newer Solaris hosts we have. So unfortunately I don't have a clear straight forward answer for you. Some of that is because this a moving target. Our thoughts on backup levels of hosts might change over time as the host ages.

[Gostev]

For basic file-level backup, as an immediate workaround, could you just use our NAS backup functionality? Pardon my ignorance, but is it possible install NFS or SMB server on Solaris, and make the folders you want to be backing up accessible through it?

[danilob]

Hi! I´m also a big Solaris user and very gratefull for the new Agent v3. However I´d like to know when it will support Solaris SPARC Bare metal restore feature, since the agent still only works at file level backup.
Thanks

[Gostev]

We're getting close to beta for this functionality, so it should be out later this year.