Mitel VIRTUAL APPLIANCE (vMCD) backup using Veeam

[regi]

Hi need some advise. We use Mitel virtual appliance (vMCD) for our phone system. It runs very nicely but snapshot is not allowed.
They say the performance impact on Disk I/O is too large, making it impossible for Mitel virtual appliances to meet voice quality requirements.
It will be nice if I can use Veeam (Just like I do on our 100+ VM's every day) to backup in the night. I'm wondering this may corrupt the DB of the vMCD etc...
The only recommended way is power off and backup & power on which is not ideal or export backup to remote share
(In case of a restore I have to import Mitel .OVA and restore config file but we all know how easy it's to restore from Veeam )

The system is not used in the night

Appreciate any advise or feedback

Cheers

/R

[veremin]

I'm not personally familiar with the said system, but still wondering whether there is an approach using which you can guarantee application consistency at the time of snapshot? Say, native tools or scripts with which you can stop/start services, etc. Thanks.

[therealdj]

Hi Regi,
I think mitel are saying dont run the VM's with snapshots present for a large period of time, for example keeping a server running form a snapshot for a couple of weeks after an upgrade. Because Veeam deletes the snapshot as soon as the backup finishes you should be fine, especially if the snapshot is out of busy production.

[Vitaliy S.]

Good point, Dave. If they provide an appliance, then creating snapshots should be fully supported, otherwise what's the point?

[dellock6]

Don't be so sure, also Cisco doesn't support snapshots for their Unified Communication appliances, even if they are appliances.
You have two choices here, since "not supported" actually means that if there's any issue, they will not support you:
- do as they ask and be on the safe side. As you say that noone is using the phone during the backup time, plan for scheduled outages and run pre- post- scripts to power down and up the appliance
- try to run snapshots anyway, and see what happens. It may be that the appliance doesn't have any issue. But be ware that there may be issues, Cisco for example can suffer time delays in phone calls during snapshots. Run also from time to time the inner backup so you can restore the appliance if snapshots create issues. Try do use fast backup methods as directsan/nfs, and use forward incremental to limit the time the snapshot stays open.

[regi]

Look at
http://edocs.mitel.com/UG/Apps-Solution ... zation.pdf

Page 35 on actual PDF Re: Supported VMware features
I will try snapshot backup one day as non of my users don't use phones & I can bring back all VM's & restore config in matter of minutes in the morning in case any issues
(We can live without land line phones for some time ie not mission critical)

They are all Linux 2.6.x (32 & 64 Bit) VM's

But for a large phone system, Veeam backup will be a winner if it works. Note the below

vMotion is supported while a vMotion operation is in progress, users may notice voice degradation, and some communication services may
become unavailable for a brief time. For MiVoice Business Virtual, the voice degradation has been
observed only in features provided by the Media Server. This includes conferencing, music-on--hold, paging, and RAD to
external voice mail applications like NuPoint Unified Messaging. Ensure that anti-affinity rules are applied such that vMotion
cannot move primary and secondary instances of a resilient Mitel application (MiVoice Business Virtual, MBG Virtual) to
the same physical host server. For more information, see “Anti-affinity rules” on page 33.

Thanks for all your advise

[Vitaliy S.]

Yep, seems like it is ok to do VM image level backups for this appliance:

To perform a complete backup of your system, you can use VMware management functions to back up the full virtual appliance VM, which includes all of the virtual applications running on it. When creating backups of the whole VM, you must ensure that you have plenty of storage space because the backups can be very large for a large system. In the general case, you can take a snapshots of the whole VM while it is powered on (running), suspended, or shut down.

[lando_uk]

HI, I'm reviving this thread, as I've had this Mitel requirement dumped on me.

"Live snapshots are not supported for Mitel virtual appliances.
Snapshots of a suspended Virtual Machine are also not supported.
Mitel virtual appliances must be powered down before a snapshot is saved."

"Because Mitel virtual appliances are communicating with other devices on the network and
because the risk of a database corruption increases when live snapshots are taken, it is strongly
recommended that the Virtual Machine hosting a Mitel virtual appliances be powered down
prior to taking a snapshot."

So did the OP manage to sort out this problem, or was it actually a non-issue?

[veremin]

The OP decided to check how well the said application performs, when there is a snapshot present.

As Luca's mentioned, there are two options:

- follow mitel's recommendations and backup only powered off VM
- disregard mitel's recommendations, backup live VMs

Anyway, it would hurt to clarify those requirements with mitel's representative.

Thanks.