Backup/Restore of Vmwarebased Novell eDir and GroupWise VMs

[westCPS]

Hello!

Have anybody Know How or Informations about backup and restore of VMware VMs which are running Novell eDir and GroupWise?
Is it possible to backup them with Veeam B&R "application-aware" like Exchange on Windows VMs with VSS?
Is it possible to restore them with Veeam B&R on object-base (single email an so on)?
Or have somebody other ideas to backup/restore them.

I'm thankfull for any answers.

Best regards
Werner

[skrause]

What base OS is on your GroupWise/eDir servers?

If you are running GroupWise on a windows server, you could probably leverage the U-AIR wizards to do an item level restore of some sort. There is no Veeam Explorer for Novell like there is for AD/Exchange/Sharepoint/SQL/Oracle.

As far as being able to backup/restore the VMs, veeam can do a "crash consistent" backup of pretty much anything that runs on VMware. I have been able to backup/restore OS/2 Warp vms with no issues.

[jmmarton]

Have anybody Know How or Informations about backup and restore of VMware VMs which are running Novell eDir and GroupWise?
Is it possible to backup them with Veeam B&R "application-aware" like Exchange on Windows VMs with VSS?
Is it possible to restore them with Veeam B&R on object-base (single email an so on)?
Or have somebody other ideas to backup/restore them.

I've done some testing of this in my home lab with GroupWise 2014 R2 running on OES 2015. In the application-aware processing settings of the job I disable application processing. I also leverage pre-freeze/post-thaw scripts where I stop ndsd & the GW agents. This allows for a completely clean backup of the environment. Now as far as recovery goes, we don't have any specific explorers for eDir or GroupWise. If the PO is on NSS, you could restore the PO using file-level recovery of NSS to a GW restore area and use the features built into the GW client to restore individual items. The same holds true honestly of other filesystems whether GW is running on SLES, OES, or Windows. A completely different way of getting the day would be to use Veeam Instant VM Recovery to spin up the VM with the PO in question, then use the GW client on the same VM or another VM in the virtual lab to access the PO, find the needed items, archive them, then you could copy the archive off to a client machine in your production network to restore the archive back into the production PO.

As to eDir, if you happen to also have AD and you're using something like IDM to sync between the two you could then easily use our Explorer for AD to recover users into AD and have that sync over to eDir. Plus the user then being created into either AD or GW could be used to recreate the mailbox in GW.

These are a few ideas at least when it comes to restoring eDir and GroupWise.

Joe

[westCPS]

Hello!

The Novell System running on SLES. Thanks for your answers. I think so we can go to test that in a Test-enviroment, just to be sure that anything work as we thinking. I'm not sure we can stop the services as long the backup is running, 'cause in the production enviroment is 24/7.

Best regards
Werner

[jmmarton]

I'm not sure we can stop the services as long the backup is running, 'cause in the production enviroment is 24/7.

Keep in mind that services wouldn't be down long. When you use pre-freeze/post-thaw scripts, here's what happens.

- Pre-freeze script runs
- VMware snapshot is taken
- Post-thaw script is run

The services would only be down for as long as it takes to take a snapshot which usually isn't very long. If someone has the GW client open in online mode they would likely just see it hang briefly and then it would return back to them. If it's in caching mode they wouldn't see anything at all. WebAccess might be the only service briefly interrupted. It might be worth trying it out in a test environment.

Joe

[westCPS]

Thank you Joe. What i meant is that i don't know how long we need to stop and start the services correct and between this time the service is off. But hopefully we can Setup the test enviroment to check if it works.

Best regards
Werner

[korth1]

Hello Joe, Werner,
I think this is a very interesting way off backup for us. Now we use DBCopy, wich works fine, but also takes an high disk load on the servers. So i was curious what the results where from the tests wich Joe have done.

Kind regards Henk

[jmmarton]

Well in my testing with my lab it's fine. I'd still encourage you to test in your environment. You can go to the VeeamHub repository hosted on GitHub to see some sample scripts.

https://github.com/VeeamHub/applications

On a separate note, if you are running GroupWise on OES with NSS instead of running it on plain SLES, note that we've added OES 2015 support in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5.

https://www.novell.com/communities/cool ... 5-support/

Joe

[jmmarton]

For anyone who may be watching this old thread, Veeam and Micro Focus are co-presenting a webinar on Nov. 2, 2017 regarding backing up GroupWise using not only Veeam but also a solution from Micro Focus themselves.

https://www.novell.com/communities/cool ... cro-focus/

In fact I'll be one of the presenters.

Joe

[jmmarton]

The webinar recording is available on veeam.com.

https://www.veeam.com/videos/groupwise- ... 10639.html

Joe