Has anyone used Veeam to backup a Cisco BE6000 VoIP server?

[nickfurnell]

Hi Guys

I have a Twitter thread (see http://twitter.com/nickfurnell) going at the moment. Not sure if anyone else can help answer the question.. Looking at a Cisco VoIP solution which is actually a Cisco UCS server branded as an BE6000 appliance, under the hood it's VMware ESXi & 5 VM's managing the voice traffic - all on local storage I guess. Does anyone have any experience of these appliances and if they can be backed up with Veeam or do you not need to, maybe they export their config via FTP.

If you had two (which we can't afford) they can back each other up, apparently.

Any thoughts or real experience would be appreciated.
Nick Furnell

[chrisdearden]

Hi Nick, its easier to reply here without a 140 Character limit

I did work for a cisco gold partner in a previous life - it seems that this is a bundled deployment of "UC on UCS" with one of the Rackmount UCS boxes.

As long as you upgrade the ESXi Licences to the foundation versino , the VADP API is available for use to use to back the Machines up.

However , as you pointed out , the Cisco support guidelines are extreemly fussy about backups an co-existance with non UC workloads etc.

The main reason for this is that Real Time communication are really sensetive to any latency - if you were to loose a couple of pings to a web server , its no biggy , but if thats your main phone server and everyones call drops , then you are going to get in trouble.

I believe the CU servers back them selves by dumping their configuration to a TFTP server - rather than backing up the whole virtual machine.

Of course if you want a belt & braces setup then I would take veeam backups of the VM's themselves offline , or run backups when you don't see any phone system risk , but it would be of course officially unsupported ( by cisco )

[nickfurnell]

Thanks Chris

Yes, much better when the 140chr limit is removed! I found the license ESXi upgrade reference (R-VMW-UC-FND5-K9) for the appliance thanks. Guessed that the config could be offloaded using TFTP, we looked at another VoIP solution which did a similar process. As a business we are open 7am - 10pm, although we have the potential for 24/7 calls it's rare - I planned a early hours backup of the system giving me confidence that every day I had an emergency roll back plan. On top of the £1k for the license upgrade, I would need to purchase an additional Veeam license as our 6 CPU's are already used. No big problem I guess.

Just from a practical point of view, would I be able to schedule the Veeam backups via our current VMware infrastructure? Even if the Cisco is technically in a different VMware Datacentre..

Thanks
Nick

[tsightler]

Cisco UC has a built in backup function that can be scheduled to dump backups to a common location. It's been a little while, but I believe the built in capability effectively produces a DB dump and TAR backup of configuration data and ships it to a location via SFTP so it requires an SSH/SFTP server somewhere to dump the files.

[chrisdearden]

Just from a practical point of view, would I be able to schedule the Veeam backups via our current VMware infrastructure? Even if the Cisco is technically in a different VMware Datacentre..

correct - you should be able to add the host as a standalone vsphere host ( just make sure we have some root credentials to it )

[cooolcisco]

took us absolutely ages but we found it, all you need to know about the hardware spec for the BE 6000 are on this link, enjoy http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/UC_Virtua ... quirements

[dellock6]

Also by registering a standalone ESXi with local storage, you are going to use network mode for backups, and in a way this is a good solution to be "light" on the VMs. At least you are not going to stun the VM as in hotadd mode for example.

Luca.

[nickfurnell]

Thanks everyone for the quick feedback.

We are going for a demo of the system tomorrow (8th Oct) so will ask some questions regarding backup and upgrading the license to Full ESXi. If I learn anything new I will post here and Tweet (http://twitter.com/nickfurnell) the link.

Thanks
Nick Furnell