SimpliVity Backup failure alerts

[PWT_Procloud]

Is there an SVT GUI (future roadmap) which can be used to manage SimpliVIty backup jobs as most clients are not content with just doing searches via vSphere window "especially with 100VM plus sites". What is best practise on monitoring these without having to run svt-backup commands in putty sessions, something the client is not trained to do.

[JohnHHaines]

An interesting question - I have not seen that on a roadmap. They want to be able to find failures/issues more eailsy ?

[PWT_Procloud]

A client made a valid point from an auiting perspective, is there an easy way to export a list of all VMs which have a failed backup job over a period of time say 2 weeks or a month etc? Reviewing SimpliVity Backups from within vCSA is quite limited at present, hence is there any advancements scheduled for this area in future Omnistack releases.

[CoolCoder]

Hello,

An alternative way is to use the REST API to get these statistics. Few customers earlier requested notification for any failures in backups, etc., and a powershell/python based script is implemented to notify periodic backups to the customer over an email.

Sample version of the script is available in the github.

https://github.com/AvinashJalumuru/SimpliVity-Notify-Backups

Thanks.

[MikeSeden]

Just thinking out loud-

SimpliVity is HA in it's design. If properly deployed and configured backups taken would only need to be used for DR purposes, if the complete datacenter went down. There are always 2 copies of the VM's on the nodes. Failed backups of SimpliVity VMs put on the DR node(s),  is basically a VMware process, or whatever back up solution the Customer is using. SimpliVity doesn't take backups or snapshots, VMware does.

SimpliVity data is held on the TIA card until written in both places on both copies on both nodes.. The data is always in two places. With VMware HA enabled VMware can spin up a copy of the VM's on the secondary node(s) with the last data I/O's intact if a primary node fails. There are some failure scenario's that can cause lost data, but I rarely see them happen. These scenario's are when you would need a backup from a DR site to restore the VM(s).

The "SimpliVity Backup" is basically a VMware backup of a VM running on a SimpliVity node manged by the SimpliVity plugin in vCenter. My point is that SimpliVity is a storage solution that is designed to Dedupe data and be HA, not really designed to do backup's. That is probablly why you haven't seen a backup management monitoring process in the SimpliVity side of things. That could very well change down the road especilly with InfoSight being added to the solution, but I think there are a lot of other improvements in line before monitoring failed backups.