HPE Simplivity Backup Infrastructure

[Karan2]

Hi Folks,

I am pretty new to managing HPE HCI Simpivity DL 380 Gen9. I wanted to know about the backup process in Simplivity. Following are the points I needed information about:

• Is there a provision to take scheduled backups : Weekly and monthly backup.,
• The Location/storage where the backup is stored so I can view which Storage needs to monitored.
• Process of Deduplication and Deduplication Ratio calculation for Simplivity VM Backups.

Thanks,

Karan.

[DeclanOR]

Hi Karan2,

Thanks for your query.

I would recommend that you read through Chapter 9 of the following document which explains backups in detail, and should help you understand scheduling etc.

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=1010292248&docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-a00027987en_us

Regards the storage of your backups: Backups should normally reside where the primary and secondary deata copies of your VM reside. So for example, taking a 3 node cluster : VM01 has it's VM data copies on node 1 and 2, so it's backups will also reside on node 1 and 2.

Every VM, and every backup has a primary and secondary (HA pair) data copy. The backups for these VM's are automatically put in line with their primary and secondary data copies. The reason this is done, is to ensure that we maximise deduplication ratios on each node............so in response to your question - there is no definitive location to where they are stored. They will be stored where your primary and secondary VM copies are located.

Regards your final question on deduplication ratio calculation per backup - on a per-backup scale, we do not provide this data. We do however provide a cluster level calculation seeing as this is a distributed system which you can see in the vCenter UI by going to: Cluster - Monitor - HPE Simplivity Capacity

I hope this helps to answer your questions.

Best regards,

DeclanOR

[scott_svt]

Just to add to @DeclanOR's point, the deduplication ratios cannot be split out per object, as there is no distinction between a backup and a VM on-disk. What you are looking at is the deduplication ratio per-node (from the REST API), or cluster-wide (in the vSphere Client). What you can do is get the value of unique data, i.e. data that is not deduplicated on a per backup basis. This can be useful to understand the impact backups have on capacity. To do this, you can right-click on a backup and select 'calculate unique backup size' in the GUI.