VMware and NetApp integrated backups for Oracle on RHEL7

[gairys]

Hi everyone, my apologizes in advance if this question has already been answered somewhere, but I've checked NetApp, VMware, and the Veeam forums and can't seem to find an answer to this layout.

Our current configuration is running Oracle 11 on RHEL 7 in VMware. We split our disks into multiple vmdk files as per our design documentation; OS on 1st, binaries and logs on 2nd, database on 3rd, and 1 day of archive on 4th. The DBAs require the local access for RMAN to do restores in an emergency. Our backend is NetApp FAS8200 with SAS connected via iSCSI. We have the integration working and backups are now minutes instead of hours. The problem we are running into is our database requirements are for 3 databases per product, a dev, test, and prod layout, and some of our databases are getting over 2 TB. To complicate things more, we added a AFF200, which they want to move to, but I don't have space for all of the databases, so it's been suggested to move OS/binaries/logs to SSD and keep database and archives on SAS. And to complicate things even more, the DBAs are used to writing RMAN backups locally then writing off to NFS and we use Veeam for our VM backups. My boss understandably has no interest in introducing another product into our environment that we would have to support, NetApp SnapManager for Oracle and NetApp SnapCenter. He doesn't care if I utilize SnapCenter to monitor our snapshot/snapmirror/snapvault status and relationships, but he doesn't want me to shift from using Veeam. He would like to pull the Oracle backups into Veeam if we can do this.

My question is this works when things are all in the same datastore, but when I move to two different datastores will Veeam with the NetApp integration still work as it has. I currently snapshot locally then XDP to a remote site nightly. If I change the environment to use vmdks for OS/binaries/logs on SSD and move databases to iSCSI pRDM and archives to NFS, will Veeam be able to still utilize the SM/SV for the pRDM in a single backup job? And would it be possible for the DBA team to kick off an Oracle backup during the day if they needed to?

I know this is a long question, but I wanted to make sure as much information was provided to answer the question. Thanks everyone for your help.

[foggy]

Hi Gairy, provided you're at least on Veeam B&R 9.5 U4, having different VM disks residing on datastores located on different NetApp LUNs or even systems is not an issue, this will work within the multi-homed VMs support added in U4.

[gairys]

Thanks foggy. We just recently upgraded to U4a for HV 2019 support, and I completely missed this feature. For our VMware Oracle instances, if we have multiple Oracle VMs in a single datastore, and each database has a separate LUN for database files, and we trigger a job based on the "root" LUN, will it also fire against all of the database LUNs? Previously to minimize headaches and timing, we just set our backup jobs based on the LUNs they were in.

[foggy]

Yes, all involved LUNs will be covered.