p4500 g2 with vsphere - backup of the (windows 2008r2)VMs

[gt2777]

Hi there,

got two p4500 in a cluster. Have vshere 4.1 and windows 2008 r2 VMs running on it.

Is there any benefit of the windows solution pack that i got? It is just for direct connected windows servers, right?

in my understanding i can't use it (windows solution pack ) for Backup and so on because i use vsphere - is this right?

so how to backup windows VMs. got the vsphere essentials plus - so i think data recovery software from vmware is a good decision to make consistent backup - what do you think?

What up with this - HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter - what can i do with this. is it planned to use it for backing up VMs in future? 

[ajamil786]

If your VMs reside on p4000 san,  you can create snapshots (manually or via scheduled tasks) that will serve as backup of your VM environment. These are point-in-time snapshots. You can also use VMware backup solution or both.

[gt2777]

yes, but vmware backup is better because VMs are with  quiesced operating system. storage are not..

what about the use of the windows solution pack? any infos if i can need this in my situation?

[gt2777]

nobody?

[Thomas Halwax]

Hi,

Windows Solution Pack contains Multi Path Software (MPIO) and a Volume Shadow Copy Provider (VSS Provider). If you present your volumes via MS iSCSI to the guest operating system VSS Provider is needed to create "application aware" snapshots of your volumes (flush OS disk buffers first, then create snapshot). If you use VMFS volumes only you do not need neither MPIO nor VSS.

Don't know if VMWare's Data Recovery software is very good. I tried it but it seems to be unstable. Using SMB shares as backup targets is also limited to 400GB (you can mount bigger ones but DR gives you a warning).

I'm using MS Data Protection Manager 2010 on a dedicated backup server.

Thomas

[gt2777]

Thank you for your response.

you can use Data recovery with a hard disk as backup target. Works better!

(quote)

. If you present your volumes via MS iSCSI to the guest operating system VSS Provider is needed to create "application aware" snapshots of your volumes

(/quote)

how can i do that? when you install your windows VM on ESX there is no way to use the MS-iSCSI for the system partition. you can create additional partitions with the MS-iSCSI but not the system partition..

[Paul Hutchings]

VSS aware snapshots are typically for apps like Exchange and SQL Server.

What you'd do in a virtual environment is have the OS partition as a VMDK on VMFS, so you need to back that up using whatever software you're using to backup at the vSphere level.

You then create volumes for databases and logs on the P4000 and mount them using the iSCSI initiator inside your virtual machine.

That way you gain in several ways:

The HP DSM for Windows does much better load balancing/spread of sessions across all nodes.

You can take application aware, quisced snapshots.

Your vSphere backups may be quicker because (as an example) you're only having to backup small OS VMDK's using your vSphere backup agent, the actual data can be backed up using the Windows agents for your backup software - this is usually a bit more flexible and may offer better performance.

[Dan Nichols]

@Paul

- Is guest level MPIO supported by VMware now? http://communities.vmware.com/thread/275169?start=15&tstart=0

- Do you use guest level MPIO?

I agree with the benefits and since there is still no sign of a P4000 MPIO for VMware in-guest MPIO would be useful from a performance perspective.

[gt2777]

thank you paul!