NetBackup is an enterprise-level backup and recovery solution developed by Veritas. It supports a variety of platforms, including many versions of AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Tru64, Solaris, Windows, and Unix. NetBackup uses a central master server to manage both clients and servers that contain the backup media. The current version of NetBackup is 7.0, which uses NetBackup OpsCenter to manage multiple NetBackup environments. OpsCenter replaces NetBackup Operations Manager (NOM), which was used in previous versions of NetBackup.
NetBackup supports many backup devices, including disk drives, tape drives and tape libraries. It also has many features that are useful to enterprises such as hot backups for databases, tape vaulting, and Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). Furthermore, NetBackup can perform backups in a Storage Area Network (SAN) environment without servers or LANs.
These capabilities allow NetBackup to natively backup and restore the virtual machines (VMs) of many virtualization products such as VMware Infrastructure. NetBackup isn’t specifically designed as a virtual migration tool, but you can also use it to move virtual servers from one physical location to another.
Today, we’ll discuss the methods that DataEndure used to migrate its VMs from servers hosted by cloud solutions provider Peak to its own data center in Santa Clara, California.
Overview
DataEndure uses digital resilience to protect its client’s critical information assets. It takes a holistic approach to developing a data management strategy that leverages integrated solutions and simplifies the IT environment. DataEndure customers are therefore better able to manage IT risks and can respond more quickly when those assets are threatened. DataEndure also maintains partnership accreditations with leading IT solution providers, including Veritas.
The task of relocating the VMs to Santa Clara required the system administrator to make WAN-based backups of the VMs on the cloud servers to a Veritas NetBackup 5230 appliance in Santa Clara. The 5230 is an enterprise backup appliance with expandable storage and a content-aware deduplication capability that reduces backup size. It also has the Veritas V-Ray technology that provides greater visibility in virtual environments, reducing recovery time and storage costs. The 5230 is rack-mountable with 40 terabytes (TB) of storage and uses SATA-600 and SAS-2 interfaces. It also offers high-speed data transfers, including an 8Gb Fibre Channel and external Gigabit Ethernet connection.
Adding Virtual Machines
The system administrator used NetBackup Accelerator to add the VMs one at a time. Accelerator uses technology that eliminates the need to read the entire file system, which significantly reduces backup times. This technology includes an independent track log that allows Accelerator to intelligently detect changed files and send only the changed segments to media server during the backup. These segments are written to a storage pool that is currently supported by NetBackup appliances, NetBackup Media Server Deduplication Pools and PureDisk Deduplication Option Pools. Accelerator then generates an inline optimized backup from the data segments. The reduction of IT resources such as CPU, Disk I/O, memory, network bandwidth, and storage typically places the cost of performing a complete backup with Accelerator on par with the cost of an incremental backup with a traditional solution.
Backups
The initial backup was written to a Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) storage unit, which was a time-consuming process due to the need to add virtual clients one at a time. Accelerator and deduplication considerably reduced the time required to perform successive backups. A schedule of full backups each week and differential backups each day kept the VMs current until they could be migrated.
MSDP is a member of the Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) family of multicast routing protocols defined by Experimental RFC 3618 and is primarily used for IPv4 and IPv6 multicasts. MSDP interconnects multiple PIM Sparse-Mode (PIM-SM) domains, allowing PIM-SM to have rendezvous point (RP) redundancy and inter-domain multicasting. Each multicast tree requires its own RPs, which are all peers with each other. MSDP messages contain the data source and the group address of the data source, which an RP can read to determine which group members in its domain are interested in a particular multicast. Interested members can then send a join message to the data source. One RP in each domain also listens for new TCP connections on port 639, which is commonly used for this purpose.
Restoration
The system administrator tested the restore procedures by restoring several VMs to a VirtualCenter environment before migrating the entire VM set. The VMs were then started with NetBackup Instant Recovery for VMware once the migration was complete.
Instant Recovery is a feature of NetBackup that allows users to boot an instance of a virtual machine (VM) directly from a backup copy. This feature combines several individual technologies that create a data snapshot with minimal disruption to the users and store the snapshot on disk as a complete backup image. Instant Recovery provides the capability to run an application directly from secondary storage, which is necessary during the restoration of the primary VM. Instant Recovery generally allows a disk backup to be recovered quickly, although the specific startup time for this process is primarily dependent on the speed of the network and storage devices rather than the size of the VM.
Takeaway
The remainder of the virtual migration consisted of minor changes to the network and DNS entries, allowing the original servers to be powered off and removed. This process allowed DataEndure to move a petabyte of data in 10 minutes, including SQL servers and their associated application servers.
