Backup of Riverbed VM's

[panzer]

We are running a Riverbed solution where the branch VMs are replicated by Riverbed Steelfusion between main and branch office. The replicated VMs in the main Office are stored on HP P4000 (StoreVirtual), and are managed by a Riverbed VM running on ESXi 6.0. Does anybody know if it is possible tu use Veeam B&R as a backup solution at the main Office?

[veremin]

I'm not familiar with the said solution, but as long as those VMs are registered in vSphere infrastructure and can be snapshotted, there should not be any issues with backing them up.

This guide seems to state the same.

Thanks.

[poulpreben]

Hi Stig,

Good question. I have some degree of exposure to these appliances about one year ago. We worked together with Riverbed trying to stabilize the solution, but ultimately with no success.

The VMs are running in the ROBO, and if you want to create the backup at HQ, you would have to perform some operations to make the storage snapshot on the StoreVirtual array accessible.

1. Clone the snapshot to make it writeable
2. Mask the cloned snapshot to an ESXi host at HQ
3. Rescan HBAs on the ESXi host to discover the VMFS
4. Register all VMs from the datastore
5. Create a backup job containing those VMs
6. Once backup has finished, unregister temporary VMs and destroy the snapshot clone

As you will have to repeat all these steps each day, you will face mulitple issues. Especially step 4 is the most problematic one. The re-registered VMs will have a new unique identifier on vSphere, which causes a full backup. There is no possible solution to creating reliable, incremental backups using this solution.

Riverbed's proposed solution to the issue was to simply force the storage array to destroy and clone a new snapshot daily, and effectively refreshing the datastore. This solution solely relies on ESXi reconnecting a "broken path" to the datastore and then simply trigger step #3. We decided not to support such solution, when our QA teams found it being too unreliable. This was unfortunately where the collaboration ended.

Thanks,
Preben