Best practice for offsite copy

[adrianmarsh]

Hi,

I have a Management physical server that runs Veeam 5, Netbackup, vSphere, I have two hosts, a main EMC SAN for the hosts, and an IOMEGA SAN thats used for backups by both Veeam and Netbackup disk backups.

We use Netbackup in addition to Veeam because we have to backup some physical hosts. I don't have any nice big pipes to offsite data storage, so at the moment I have to use LTO4 tapes and a robotic drive to create offsite backups.

My question here, is whats the best way to create Veeam backups, that I can take offsite?

Currently, I'm copying off the files from the IOMEGA SAN that Veeam creates. This isn't great for two main reasons:

1) Those files obviously change when Veeam runs, and if the tape dump is in progress then that leaves the backup possibly corrupt.
2) Those images contain 10+ copies of the original VMs. Whereas with my offsite I only really need one copy of the VM.

Any suggestions on how I can improve this for offsite?

I'm planning to migrate Veeam to v6 and put it on its own server, as theres some clashes for NFS between Netbackup and Veeam, but that won't solve my issue of how to make an offsite backup of the VM machines.

[dellock6]

Hi Adrian
some quick tips for your scenario:
- scheduling: you can set netbackup to start right after veeam backup job, by configuring netbackup startup script in Veeam post-backup job. In this way you'll be sure it will start only when Veeam has finished.
- off-site: vaulting to tape is better using forward incremental: you will end up having a couple full VBK files, and many VIB files during the week. Previous files will not be modified by Veeam, so if NetBackup uses incremental backups it will save only newly created Veeam files.
If you need to vault to tape only once in a week, you can do a trick and filter files to be saved by NetBackup, and only select VBK files and not VIB.

Luca.

[adrianmarsh]

Hi Luca,

I'll check into how to initiate the backup from Veeam to NB. I'm guessing that would be classed as a User-backup by NB.
Can I script it so that it only runs after the consolidation run that Veeam does? Then I could see the VBK filtered backups making sense. We only dump to offsite tape once a week, so this could start after Veeam does its consolation work. Is that what you meant by Forward incrementals ?

[dellock6]

Forward incremental is the standard method Veeam suggests when creating new jobs.
It creates a first full backup and then a set of incremental files. Check User Guide from page 25 about the backup methods. This is the best method for offloading to tape.
About the post-job, I do not know about NetBackup, but yes Veeam will run a script to start NetBackup once it has finished its jobs.

Luca.

[adrianmarsh]

I've got the Backup Mode set as "Incremental" with Synthetic fulls (forever-incremental) on a Saturday, which i think is the default.
So does that mean that (assuming the Synths complete on the Sat) that I could just grab *.VBK files on a Sunday ??

Oddly, when I look at the VBK file for one of my Exchange DAG VMs, it has a modified timestamp of back in 2011... (.vib files up until recently).

[foggy]

Looks like synthetic fulls were not performed for this VM since 2011..

[Gostev]

You are better off performing full backup now, and fixing your job schedule to include periodic synthetic or active fulls be sure that your job is set to run on the day where you have full backup schedule.