Micro Focus OES Support

[IceCubicle99]

Can anyone tell me if Micro Focus's OES product is supported on physical servers? I've been looking through the Veeam documentation and the only thing I've been able to find relates to VMs. We still have a number of OES systems which are all physical. We've been using SEP Sesam to backup those systems but I would much prefer to use Veeam if possible.

I've logged a support case about this but I'm currently going back and forth with them explaining what OES is.... I seem to have this problem with vendors a lot anymore.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Gostev]

Hello! No, we have no Veeam Agent from Micro Focus OES, and it's not in the short-term roadmap. So if you want to protect these systems with Veeam, you will need to virtualize them. Thanks!

[IceCubicle99]

Thanks. I was hoping that wasn't the answer but thanks for confirming.

[jmmarton]

Sorry for joining the party late, but actually we do in fact support OES though not directly. The current Veeam Agent for Linux has a "snapshot-less" mode for file-level backups which can backup any mounted filesystem. It does not require any specific filesystem support. So what I would suggest is doing the following.

- Perform a volume-level backup, specifically excluding your NSS volumes. This way we backup the non-NSS volumes (e.g. ext3/btrfs/xfs for the root filesystem) and can perform BMR of the box if it fails.
- Perform snapshot-less filelevel backup of your NSS volumes.

I personally did this in a POC with pre-GA code at the end of last year, and we were able to backup NSS volumes on the customer's physical OES servers without issues.

The only thing we wouldn't get is the metadata, meaning we wouldn't backup (or restore) trustee information. But you could always use a pre-script that dumps trustee information to a file which can be leveraged to recover trustees if necessary, and that would only be needed if you were recovering a folder where trustees were assigned. Otherwise inheritance should normally handle trustees. Regarding the pre-script, you can use the tips I posted for backing up virtualized OES servers back when we didn't natively restore NSS trustee information with VBR.

https://community.microfocus.com/t5/OES ... -p/1783363

Joe

[Gostev]

As usual, "works" and "support" are two different things officially, OES is not in the list of supported Linux distros for Veeam Agent for Linux (VAL) at the moment, because we don't test VAL on it. It may very well work, because OES is based on SUSE anyway (which is supported), however who knows what VAL-impacting artifacts OES may have in its customizations.

[jmmarton]

The only concern VAL would have with OES would be the kernel driver that gets installed to take snapshots of mounted volumes. But if snapshot-less mode is used, that goes away. And since it's not that OES is based off of SLES, but rather is simply a set of services running on top of SLES then any versions of SLES supported by VAL should be supported in an OES environment in snapshot-less mode. In fact, "entire machine" and "volume level" should also be officially supported other than NSS volume backup which is specifically not supported.

Joe

[Gostev]

May be they should be - but as of right now, there's no support for installing VAL on OES as a whole (even before we get to all those smaller details listed in your post).

[PTide]

The only concern VAL would have with OES would be the kernel driver that gets installed to take snapshots of mounted volumes. But if snapshot-less mode is used, that goes away.

Small clarification - it goes away only if you don't install/load the module at all. In this case you only will be able to use snapshot-less file-level mode. Sometimes you don't even have to take a snapshot of a unsupported volume, even loading a module on a unsupported kernel might break things (although normally it should fail to load in the first place).

Thanks!

[magnunfs]

Hey, guys.
About the Micro Focus OES agent... Do we have any updates on that? Will it be supported at some point?

I have a client with some Micro focus OES servers running file servers on NSS volumes. (They are clustered using RDM). So backup using VMware Snapshot is not an option.

Could NAS backup be an option if they enable CIFS on NSS volumes/shares? (Just trying to look for a workaround).
These servers have around 60 TB of data.

[Gostev]

NAS backup is certainly a good option if they can make the data available as an SMB or NFS share.