Once, I started installation of Symantec Backup Exec service pack update when tape library inventory job was running. After installation has been completed I ended up with library offline and not available. It happened because of hanged NDMP sessions. To list your media changer and tape drives information run:
storage show mc
storage show tape
or
sysconfig -m
sysconfig -t
To list and kill particular NDMP sessions run:
ndmpd status
ndmpd kill job_id
Then restart Backup Exec service.
Grandfather-Father-Son is an industry standard backup scheme, where you have 5 daily backups, 5 weekly backups and as many monthly as you need. Symantec Backup Exec has prebuilt policy for GFS, but before going into configuring backup scheme itself, lets talk a little bit about general backup job configuration in Backup Exec.
Basic Terminology
Inside user interface you see Jobs, Policies, Selection Lists and Media Sets. First of all you need to create Selection List, which describes what you want to backup. There you select files and folders from your Windows, Unix or NDMP servers. Then you create Media Set, which is a collection of tapes with particular append and retention periods. Append period specifies how long data can be added to the same tape and retention period tells for how long data cannot be overwritten. Retention period starts form the time of last append to the tape. Then you create Policy. Policy, by means of templates, defines when backup jobs are run, where backups are stored and what is the type of backup – incremental, differential or full. One policy can consist of several templates. In template you specify backup date and time, as well as target tape library.
GFS Implementation
Backup Exec has a template for GFS backup rotation scheme. Click “New policy using wizard”, choose GFS scheme and then select schedule, target backup device and media sets for daily, weekly and monthly backups. By default Backup Exec suggests the following configuration.
Three tape media sets:
Policy with three templates:
Also Backup Exec automatically creates rules to resolve conflicts. For example when both Daily and Weekly backups try to run on Friday, jobs do not conflict, because weekly backups always supersede daily. Same for monthly.
I personally prefer another schedule. First of all, if you run your jobs after midnight, you will need to shift your schedules from Mon – Fri to Tue – Sat. Additionally, I run monthly backup on the first Saturday of the month. Backup Exec by default (taking into consideration my one day shift) would suggest first Sunday for the monthly backup. However, it doesn’t make much sense to have weekly on Saturday and then monthly next day on Sunday. You would just consume more space without any benefit. Also, you can schedule monthly on the last Saturday of the month, but if the last day is Thursday, for example, then you will loose four business days from your monthly backup.
After the policy is created, you need to create backup jobs using this policy by clicking on New jobs using policy. All three jobs will be created automatically according to Selection List, as well as Policy Schedule, Target, and Backup Type parameters.
I’d also recommend everyone to configure notifications. There are general Alerts properties as well as inside each job.
Several pictures of server room hardware with no particular topic.
Click pictures to enlarge.
10kVA APC UPS.
UPS’s Network Management Card (NMC) (with temperature sensor) connected to LAN.
Here you can see battery extenders (white plugs). They allow UPS to support 5kVA of load for 30 mins.
Two Dell PowerEdge 1950 server with 8 cores and 16GB RAM each configured as VMware High Availability (HA) cluster.
Each server has 3 virtual LANs. Each virtual LAN has its own NIC which in its turn has multi-path connection to Cisco switch by two cables, 6 cables in total.
Two Cisco switches which maintain LAN connections for NetApp filers, Dell servers, Sun tape library and APC NMC card. Two switches are tied together by optic cable. Uplink is a 2Gb/s trunk.
HP rack with 9 HP ProLiant servers, HP autoloader and MSA 1500 storage.
HP autoloader with 8 cartridges.
HP MSA 1500 storage which is completely FC.
Hellova cables.
I made several pictures of tape library which serves as primary backup facility in our data centre. Here what you can achieve with this library in maximum configuration:
Our configuration is rather small, 2 drives and 45TB of storage.
Click pictures to enlarge.
Here you can see how robo-arm performs library inventorization by reading barcodes with infrared scanner:
Both tape drives and robot are connected to NetApp filer with SCSI cables. All data is backed up from disk shelves directly to tape library via NDMP protocol. There is no need to feed data through backup server which eliminates any LAN congestion.
Here are connections to NetApp:
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