HP + Veeam: Fast VMware Recovery from SAN Snapshots

Transcription

1 HP + Veeam: Fast VMware Recovery from SAN Snapshots Luca Dell Oca This tech brief was compiled from a series of articles written by virtualization consultant and architect Luca Dell Oca, a specialist in the design and management of VMware infrastructures.

2 Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 More ways to WOW! Veeam provides powerful, easy-to-use and affordable backup that fully leverages the virtual environment and eliminates the need for agents. Version 6.5 includes: Free e-discovery and item recovery for Microsoft Exchange Easy VM recovery from SAN snapshots New hypervisor support: vsphere 5.1 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V 50+ other new features and enhancements Now that Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 is available, it s time to take a deep dive into my personal favorite feature of this new version: Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots. This tech brief shows you how to: Configure HP StoreVirtual for use by Veeam Connect Veeam to HP StoreVirtual Restore data from HP StoreVirtual via Veeam Contents Plan your new architecture 3 Configure HP StoreVirtual snapshots 6 Configure and browse HP StoreVirtual snapshots from Veeam Backup & Replication 9 VM recovery via HP StoreVirtual snapshots 12» Free Download 2

3 Plan your new architecture Veeam Backup & Replication supports HP StoreVirtual, both physical (LeftHand or what HP now calls StoreVirtual 4000 Storage) and virtual (StoreVirtual VSA). Even when other storage products are supported in the future, the following concepts will still be useful as general guidance. The first steps, even before you start using Veeam, include checking and configuring your HP StoreVirtual storage so it can be used in conjunction with Veeam. Choose which VMs need to be protected with SAN snapshots You must first understand the specific SAN snapshot use case. Usual backups occur on a daily basis, and this schedule is good enough for most of the VMs you are running. For some VMs, however, a more frequent backup is useful. Think about a file server or an Exchange server, where data can vary every minute. The need to protect these VMs with hourly or even more frequent backups is the best use case for SAN snapshots. However, the space required for SAN snapshots on the HP StoreVirtual storage is limited by the disk space available, and you have to deal with the added I/O required to create and manage these snapshots. You will need to separate your VMs into two lists based on whether they need to be protected by SAN snapshots. Arrange your VM to LUN distribution on vsphere Remember: Even though Veeam operates at the virtual machine level, HP StoreVirtual creates snapshots at the LUN level. Based on the list you created earlier, you will need to move your VMs among the LUNs, so that each of the LUNs hosts VMs of the same type: SAN snapshotprotected or not. In this way, you will be able to configure HP StoreVirtual snapshots only on SAN snapshot-protected LUNs. An easy way to check the actual status of your VM to LUN distribution is with vsphere Maps. If you filter the view by choosing only VM to Datastore, you will have a quick overview: 3

4 In my lab, there are two shared LUNs hosted on the HP StoreVirtual storage: vsa-snap-01 and vsa-02. Only the first is going to be configured with snapshots. Since I only want to protect the VM called fileserver with SAN snapshots, I m going to migrate splunk to another LUN/datastore. After the migration, only the desired fileserver VM is hosted on the vsasnap 01 LUN: Check the disk usage on HP StoreVirtual Now to move into the HP StoreVirtual storage. Using the HP CMC (Centralized Management Console), we first check the disk status of the cluster. In my lab, you can see I have two VSAs and a Failover Manager, and they are exporting two LUNs as described before: I created my two LUNs in thin format, so I can save space on the storage for further LUNs or snapshots. Be careful, because the default LUN type is thick. 4

5 We need to check the available space on the cluster: We are sure now we can create SAN snapshots without filling all the storage. If you do not have enough space, remember HP StoreVirtual is scale-out storage using a network RAID between the VSA or physical nodes you have. So, if you need more space, simply add another node in the cluster and rebalance your LUNs. This is an important check before you start using snapshots. 5

6 Configure HP StoreVirtual snapshots In the previous chapter, I showed you how to check and properly configure your environment to be sure you can safely use storage snapshots. Now I will show you how to configure and monitor snapshots on HP StoreVirtual. Create your SAN snapshot schedule Once your datastore is hosting only the VMs you want to protect with SAN snapshots, it is time to configure snapshots. Using the HP CMC, select the LUN you want to snapshot: The second tab in the right pane is called Snapshots. Here you will find a menu with snapshot tasks you can run. The first one is what we need: New Schedule to Snapshot a Volume: 6

7 This command opens a new dialog box, where you are going to configure the scheduled snapshots: In my example, I configured the schedule to create a new snapshot every hour. If you need a different frequency, you can run it as frequently as every minute. Be careful to avoid a schedule that can put an excessive load on your storage. To avoid the complete consumption of your storage, remember to configure the retention period of your snapshots. You can remove older snapshots by time (choose: Maximum Time to Retain a Snapshot) or by number of snapshots (choose: Maximum Number of Snapshots to Retain). In my example, I m creating one snapshot every hour, and I m going to keep a full day of history. A note about Application-Managed Snapshot: Snapshots are usually taken at a specific point-in-time, but an application writing to that volume may not be quiesced. Thus, data may be in-flight or cached, so the actual data on the volume may not be consistent with the application s view of the data. In contrast, an application-managed snapshot is taken while the application using the volume is quiesced, assuring data consistency. However, in order to use application-managed snapshots, you will need to install the HP StoreVirtual VSS provider into the Windows VMs being snapshotted. Keep in mind that you will be using the Veeam VSS provider to do your usual backups, and different VSS providers do not always work well together. 7

8 After the first day of executing this schedule, your storage will show you a screen like this one: You now have 24 hourly snapshots of your HP StoreVirtual LUN! In the next chapter, I will show you how to configure and browse HP StoreVirtual snapshots from Veeam Backup & Replication. 8

9 Configure and browse HP StoreVirtual snapshots from Veeam Backup & Replication In the previous chapter, we completed the configuration on the HP StoreVirtual side. This time, we are going to configure Veeam itself. Network connection HP StoreVirtual storage has no dedicated management interface. This has always created debates among its users, since many smaller storage types have this ability. I believe that in iscsi scale-out storage, every node in the cluster must be able to talk with other nodes, since they are on the same network. Regardless of the reason behind this design, you will need to deal with it and configure other systems that need to talk with HP StoreVirtual accordingly. One of the most common configurations in VMware environments is done this way: The iscsi network is already configured (either via standard switches or distributed ones like in my lab) to connect to the HP StoreVirtual storage. So, the easiest way to connect the Veeam backup server to the HP StoreVirtual storage (obviously, if you are going to run Veeam on virtual) is to add a VM type portgroup to the iscsi switches and a second vnic to the Veeam VM, and give it an IP address on the same HP StoreVirtual subnet. Chances are you already have this configuration in place, since one of the most common places to install and use HP CMC is vcenter itself. 9

10 Configure Veeam In Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5, there is a new section named SAN Infrastructure. This is where you will configure Veeam to use SAN snapshots. You start with the Add Storage command: In the Name step, you insert the IP address or DNS name of the virtual IP, which you configured while creating the cluster: In the Detect section, you can already see Veeam talking with the HP StoreVirtual storage. In my example, it sees the group skunk-vsa-group, the two volumes vsa-snap 01 and vsa-02, and most importantly, it has found the VMs running inside vsa-snap-01 and synced its information with those coming from vcenter.skunkworks.local (my lab domain): 10

11 Expanding the tree, see the complete HP StoreVirtual structure with all the snapshots! For each, you can see its size and the number of VMs inside: If you go back to the usual Backup & Replication menu of Veeam, you see that you will not need to work in a different way when managing restores from SAN snapshots: You can browse the StoreVirtual structure in the same way you browse any other Veeam backup. As you can see, my fileserver VM is only listed once, and Veeam shows I have 24 restore points, the exact number of snapshots I have in my HP StoreVirtual storage: 11

12 VM recovery via HP StoreVirtual snapshots In the previous chapters, I explained how to create SAN-based snapshots of VMs and make them available directly inside Veeam Backup & Replication. Now it s time for the last lesson: how to do restore operations. One of the beauties of this tool is the complete integration with the standard backups that are already available in the previous version. If you look at the backup console, you see that you can do the same kind of restores available for usual backups: From the Veeam point-of-view, nothing would be different, so I would end this chapter here. However, it is still interesting to see what happens behind the scenes when you start, for example, a VM recovery. When we start the restore operation, we are first asked for a desired restore point from which to start. A restore point is equivalent to one of the available snapshots: 12

13 Then, since the restore powers up the VM directly in an ESX(i) host, the procedure asks for specific vsphere information: Finally, when the VM recovery is launched, there are multiple views of activities. First, there is the Veeam view: This log gives you a detailed understanding of how the whole process works: Veeam searches for the required snapshot. It creates a smart clone volume (basically, a clone of the snapshot that can be seen as a standalone LUN from the connecting iscsi initiator). It creates a new iscsi target name (IQN). It launches a rescan on the target ESX(i) host so the host can see and mount the new LUN (remember, this is a clone of the original VMFS datastore, so it is already formatted with a file system that ESX(i) can use it only needs to be re-signed). It registers the VM in the new LUN so it can be powered on from ESX(i). 13

14 You can also see other details from the HP StoreVirtual console: Here, you can see the highlighted original snapshot (lower left), the smart clone volume (upper left), and its new IQN (right). The LUN has the same configuration parameters of its father (120 GB, my three ESXi hosts in the access list), but it s only 1 GB in size. This is the size of the snapshot. Another great feature of HP StoreVirtual: the smart clone volume has the size of its original snapshot, instead of the parent LUN. So, multiple clone operations can be executed without consuming much space on the storage. Finally, we can see what happens inside vsphere: The activities in the Recent Tasks pane are those described earlier. The final result of these tasks is the VM named fileserver_restore, listed in the VM list. As you can see, its vmdk is hosted inside the datastore named snap-2a378c60- vsa-snap-01, which is the smart clone volume. How cool is that! 14

15 When you are finished restoring your VM (same procedure applies to filelevel restore or Microsoft Exchange objects), simply stop publishing the VM. All activities described earlier will then be reverted to bring your environment to its previous state: 15

16 About the Author Luca Dell Oca, 2011 and 2012 VMware vexpert, has worked at ICT since Since 2006, he s worked as a virtualization consultant and architect, specializing in the design and management of VMware infrastructures. He is also a co-founder and board member of the Italian VMware User Group, and author of the blog where he regularly publishes articles on virtualization and cloud computing. About Veeam Software Veeam Software develops innovative solutions for VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, and virtualization management. Veeam Backup & Replication is the #1 VM Backup solution. Veeam ONE is a single solution for real time monitoring, resource optimization, documentation and management reporting for VMware and Hyper-V. Veeam extends deep VMware monitoring to Microsoft System Center with Veeam Management Pack (MP), and to HP Operations Manager with Veeam Smart Plug-In (SPI). Veeam also provides free virtualization tools. Learn more by visiting 16