Integration with tape for long term retention of backup data
vRanger is optimized for backup to disk devices such as the StoreOnce Backup System. Where backup data must be
kept for many months or years it makes operational and economic sense to move the backup data to tape.
The format and layout of the files backed up to the Repository makes it efficient to copy the backups to tape. Backups
are written sequentially to the Repository which makes for easy identification of files to copy to tape and can save
time and space compared to other backup to disk formats.
This can be done in two different ways:
1.
vRanger writes backups to its CIFS Repository. HP Data Protector, or another backup application with tape
support, backs up that CIFS Share. Both backup solutions will run independent of each other.
2.
Use “pre” command in HP Data Protector, or another backup application with tape support, to initiate vRanger
backup. When the vRanger backup is completed, HP Data Protector will start to backup the vRanger CIFS
Repository. For details how to do this seeConclusion
StoreOnce Backup Systems and Quest Software’s vRanger deliver an efficient, high performance and robust solution
for backing up and recovering small to enterprise VMware environments. The joint solution is easy to manage and
delivers high performance deduplicated backups with fast, reliable recovery from disk. This document describes
implementation and best practices for an end-to-end solution. The settings should be tuned in a non-production
environment before implementation. Multiple additional resources are available from HP Quest and partners to
design and implement specific solutions.
Appendix 1—Certification Test results
In the certification process, we used vRanger as both physical proxy (HP BL460 G1) and virtual machine (4 vCPU
and 4 GB memory) with Hot Add. The goals of the testing was to:
•
Verify successful backups with both architectures
•
Find best practices for both StoreOnce Backup System and vRanger
•
See what deduplication ratios customers should expect
During testing, we:
•
Created one CIFS Share on the StoreOnce Backup System
•
Created one vRanger backup job to backup 10 virtual machines with mixed OS and versions:
–
Six Win 2003 R2 64 bit, two Win 2008 R2 64 bit and 2 RHEL 6.5 32 bit
–
Original size on disk: 432 GB
•
Added 1 GB of random data on first incremental, then 200 MB random data for every following incremental. We
used 1 ESX 4.1 host and 1 ESXi 4.1 host connected to HP EVA 8000 XL storage via fibre
