No that Veeam 8 is on the market for a while and NetApp cluster mode is more and more the standard.
I decided to create a lab environment to see how the Veeam and NetApp integration works in real life.
Conclusion:
– The integration is easy to setup, no needs for any managent tooling, etc
– The snapmirror / snapvault relationships need to be setup manually, in large environment, this can be a lot of work.
– The backup (local snapshot) and the mirror / vault processing cannot be de-coupled. I suppose you could create two jobs, the first creates local snapshots every two hours during business hours and the second job creates a snapshot in the evening and updates the mirror / vault.
– Recovery is (not yet?) integrated in the default restore options.
Here is my environment:
Two NetApp Simulators running OnTap 8.3RC1 on VMware ESXi 5.5 (build 2143827)
MMO-Cluster01 – this will be the production NetApp running the VM’s.
MMO-Cluster02 – this will be the vault/mirror destination for the production VM’s.
Between the two clusters I created a peer relationship to allow SnapMirror and SnapVault
This is an overview of Veeam with NetApp.
If you want to know more, read this page: http://www.veeam.com/netapp-snapshot-snapvault-snapmiror-integration.html
NetApp has done an excellent job in providing the simulators and a good manual to deploy them.
I ran into one issue, the simulators use multiextent disks which are not recognized by default.
Running a simple command on your ESXi host solves this.
esxcfg-module multiextent
On MMO-Cluster01 I created a Storage Virtual Machine named NFS with one volume.
This volume was mounted on one of my ESXi hosts and a VM was deployed.
In Veeam 8 patch1 (version 8.0.0.917) I added the two NetApp clusters.
Go to Storage infrastructure and select add storage.
After adding the clusters, the are scanned and show up in the infrastructure view.
Now we can create a backup job with the datastore in it.
With NetApp in your Storage Infrastructure, you can now select a NetApp SnapShot as your repository.
And start a backup which creates a NetApp snapshot.
Snapshot view:
Now it time to configure a SnapVault as only a local snapshot is not enough as backup.
In NetApp System Manager create a SnapVault relationship.
Add the secondary target in Veeam:
Now when we run a backup job, the SnapVault is also updated.
And the view from NetApp System Manager.
So now that we can backup to local snapshots and create a SnapVault copy.
I also tested if the retention is nicely enforced, the answer is short: It works.
Let’s start with the important stuf, what about restore??
I am not afraid!
Let get this VM back…
Under the normal restore options, we cannot recover from snapshots.
Instead we goto the Storage infrastructure and select the snapshot from which we want to restore.
Right click on the VM and you get the options we are used to.
As I deleted my entire VM, I choose “Instant VM recovery”
The job starts, within VMware you will see a few things happening.
The NetApp snapshot is presented as a NFS datastore and the VM is registered and powered on.
So, the VM is running from within it’s snapshot, this is not what we want, we want to run it from the production volume.
In Veeam Backup and replication, a instant recovery job appears.
Richt click and select “Migratie to production”
Now the VM files are copies (live with the VM powered on) to the production volume.
This is visible in VMware and Veeam
After a while my VM is running just fine, just where we want it to be.
Within NetApp this all done by using FlexClone.
