Backing up virtual machines

[cyberjock]

If the process is being driven from FreeNAS, how would you even know which hypervisor is currently hosting the VM?

p.s. it's VAAI.

In the 9.3 WebGUI you ahve to provide the ESXi server, the datastore, and the matching iSCSI device so that FreeNAS can make everything work.

Yeah. VAAI is proper. I'm half asleep today (I'm going to bed in a few minutes because I got no sleep last night... family emergency).

 

[jamiejunk]

I was doing some thinking while I was making the long commute home tonight. What if you used VMwares built in tools to take a snapshot. If you have VMware tools installed on the VM it will quiesce the disk when doing the snapshot. You could use some automation tools to delete old vmware snapshots.

So in this example you could have VMware snapshot it's VMs at 1AM. At 1:30AM you could have freenas do a zfs snapshot.

Then say you need to restore a vm from Sept 15th. Do a restore from the ZFS Sept 15th snapshot per usual. If you find the virtual machine is hosed due to filesystem issues, you then restore the vmware snapshot, that's ok because you can restore inside of Vcenter of the vmware snapshot from 1:AM on the 15th.

You could use some scripting tools to create and destroy the vmware snapshots each day, so your ZFS snapshots from that day will only have the one vmware snapshot inside it.

Kinda ghetto.. but apparently that's how I roll.

9.3 sounds like it might solve a lot of problems (please god fix replication). But who knows when it will be available and ready for production. Call me old school, but I like keeping stuff on NFS.

 

[jgreco]

In the 9.3 WebGUI you ahve to provide the ESXi server, the datastore, and the matching iSCSI device so that FreeNAS can make everything work.

I'm hoping that whatever this is is smart enough to talk to vCS, not just ESXi, or it's pretty much a bust. In most real world deployments, there's no particular mapping of VM to hypervisor. Some of my VM's have been on four different hypervisors today.

 

[jgreco]

I was doing some thinking while I was making the long commute home tonight. What if you used VMwares built in tools to take a snapshot. If you have VMware tools installed on the VM it will quiesce the disk when doing the snapshot. You could use some automation tools to delete old vmware snapshots.

So in this example you could have VMware snapshot it's VMs at 1AM. At 1:30AM you could have freenas do a zfs snapshot.

Then say you need to restore a vm from Sept 15th. Do a restore from the ZFS Sept 15th snapshot per usual. If you find the virtual machine is hosed due to filesystem issues, you then restore the vmware snapshot, that's ok because you can restore inside of Vcenter of the vmware snapshot from 1:AM on the 15th.

You could use some scripting tools to create and destroy the vmware snapshots each day, so your ZFS snapshots from that day will only have the one vmware snapshot inside it.

Kinda ghetto.. but apparently that's how I roll.

ghetto is what a product is called before someone boxes it up in a pretty package.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm hoping that whatever this is is smart enough to talk to vCS, not just ESXi, or it's pretty much a bust. In most real world deployments, there's no particular mapping of VM to hypervisor. Some of my VM's have been on four different hypervisors today.

Well, install 9.3 and give it a whirl. The BETA is expected *very* soon.

 

[jgreco]

I'm not sure what you imagine I'd install it on. Generally speaking we buy gear and stage it into production. Since FreeNAS has never been suitable for our production VM storage requirements, no gear here is suitably designed, and if it was, it'd be in production and therefore not eligible for a BETA.

I *am* very tempted to pick up something like a SC213 and build some nice new iSCSI SAN units, but there's so many compelling things to spend money on... but of course by the time that happens, there won't be a BETA for 9.3 anymore.

 

[Serverbaboon]

Veeam are gradually implementing some storage integration into their product but more for active IO VM's such as Exhange servers than a number of VM's at once.

The idea is that you quiesce the file system either wth VSS support or VM tools then use a Vmware snapshot, once complete Veeam talks to the array and creates a storage snapshot and when completes deletes the Vmware snapshot, the reason they are doing this is because on large active machines the snapshot canend up being very large and its deletion post backup can take a long time.

Does this would suggest they create a storage snapshot per vm and discount the integrity of the machines they are not backing up as they delete the storage snapshot after?

With the new parallel processing in Veeam I do not know if they wait until the all the VMs in the job are Vmware snapshotted before creating the array snapshot. This sort of functionality needs some serious integration and support from the storage array providor so I think this only works with Netapp and HP 3Par arrays.

As people said above withought the above integration then VMWare snapshots per VM are the only way from Veeam to backup VMs.

The problem of relying on ZFS sapshots instead of Vmware snapshots for things like rollback is that if you need to storage vmotion a vm off your ZFS array to another array you will lose the ZFS snapshots whereas the vmware snapshots retained ( 5.X onwards) so unless you only have one array ZFS snapshots are really only for backups?

 

[jgreco]

The problem of relying on ZFS sapshots instead of Vmware snapshots for things like rollback is that if you need to storage vmotion a vm off your ZFS array to another array you will lose the ZFS snapshots whereas the vmware snapshots retained ( 5.X onwards) so unless you only have one array ZFS snapshots are really only for backups?

Well, yes. You don't necessarily lose those snapshots but keeping track of it all becomes complicated. Speaking as someone who has worked on cloud platform backup systems professionally, I don't think there are easy answers. The VMware snapshots have their benefits and downsides. The ZFS snaps do too. A large amount of it has to do with the reason you're taking an image. If you're doing hourly snaps for disaster recovery, VMware snapshots won't be as viable because .. slow. If you're doing your weekly archival backups, definitely quiesced VMware snapshots. Assumes some things about the value of timely data, etc.

 

[Serverbaboon]

If you're doing hourly snaps for disaster recovery, VMware snapshots won't be as viable because .. slow. If you're doing your weekly archival backups, definitely quiesced VMware snapshots. Assumes some things about the value of timely data, etc.

Yes interestingly the Vmware product technology for replication for DR does not use the snapshot technology but as yet non publicly available API that picks up the delta update, needs the top licences though.