Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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bitbucket
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Splitting job into Windows and *nix

Post by bitbucket »

When I first setup B&R back with v9 I created a single job to backup the entire vsphere datacenter, well a single job and a single backup copy job. I have a mixture of Windows, Linux (multiple distros), and BSD boxes. Over time, this has become a bit of a hassle to maintain. Having to maintain individual credentials and guest processing settings for individual VMs doesn't seem the right way to do it with the "everything in one job" approach. I'm looking for input on how others manage environments like this. I know I could use VM tags for assigning VMs to jobs, this just creates a VM tag task for us to maintain...we don't use tags for anything else.

If I split this primary backup job into multiples based on OS or function, say MS SQL, MS AD, MS Mon-AD, Linux, does that really make sense? It seems it would make credential management easier (in my case) but that's just because the similar OS and tasks provided happen to use the same credentials. Will the new multiple jobs not benefit from dedup until the current job's retention period expires?

Feel like I'm rambling a bit...just seems like there is a better way to do what I need. any suggestions?
PetrM
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Re: Splitting job into Windows and *nix

Post by PetrM »

Hello,

I don't think there is a "universal" best practice as management simplicity depends on every specific case and on specific problem that you want to solve. From my point of view, it sounds reasonable to split a job into different ones depending on OS and application. As mentioned in this post, the jobs having VMs of the same OS type will benefit from dedupe as long as vbk-per-vm option is disabled. However, the disabled vbk-per-vm can affect backup performance.

Thanks!
mkh
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Re: Splitting job into Windows and *nix

Post by mkh »

Do you user folders in VMware already for other things?

How i have done it before it:
mainfolder VeeamBackupFolder1
subfolder windows-domain
subfolder windows-nondomain
subfolder linux
subfolder windows-dmz1

The job is based on the mainfolder
and then set credentials and guest processing options on the subfolders

If that suits your setup, only you can say :)
IanBolton
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Re: Splitting job into Windows and *nix

Post by IanBolton »

My initial backup jobs are segregated by their ultimate retention onto tape, as the backup jobs are set as sources for tape jobs, we have two tape jobs one with 1yr and one with 3yr retention on their gfs pools depending on the data. There are exceptions to this - my exchange servers are all in a different job because they use the same cred for application processing, same for DCs. And we recently created a separate job for large file systems where we don't want a weekly full to tape due to low change rates/high tape consumption.
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