Backup solutions for Xenserver
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@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
I am an Alike user and, although they have their own faults, the software has been doing a decent job backing up my environment....
I'm currently in the process of transitioning from Alike 3.5 to 4.2, which basically requires you to scrap and re-do your backups. Fortunately for me, I have the hardware to run both in parallel. I'm still working through the initial backups with 4.2, which are running into some snags (not unexpected), but their support has been responsive and helpful. I am hopeful things will iron out in sometime this week.
How was your transition from 3.5 to 4.2?
As of today, what can you say about working with software & the company itself?
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@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
I am an Alike user and, although they have their own faults, the software has been doing a decent job backing up my environment....
I'm currently in the process of transitioning from Alike 3.5 to 4.2, which basically requires you to scrap and re-do your backups. Fortunately for me, I have the hardware to run both in parallel. I'm still working through the initial backups with 4.2, which are running into some snags (not unexpected), but their support has been responsive and helpful. I am hopeful things will iron out in sometime this week.
How was your transition from 3.5 to 4.2?
As of today, what can you say about working with software & the company itself?
I won't say it was perfect, but so far things have been relatively well. We have three large MS-SQL VMs that I've had trouble backing up (two of them backed up without much fuss under 3.5, one is new since our migration to 4.x), but it could be environmental. I've been pretty stubborn and have stuck to Enhanced Backups. Their support engineer wants me to try Q-Hybrid backups with these VMs...I just haven't had the time to juggle around my backup jobs (I have them structured in a way that makes it difficult to deviate from Enhance Backups). I'm backing up the databases themselves, so I'm not too worried about it.
I would say I have a 95% backup success rate. There are hiccups every now and then, but it's likely those are environmental. I have not had any issues restoring data when I've needed to, which is most important.
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Thx for the update.
Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?
Curious if you've tried XO?
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Thought I'd update this. After many hours with Unitrends we got it working, and I was hitting near 100% success. And then it just stopped again. And by stopped I mean completely stopped emailing me, running scheduled backups, and running backups are just stuck. Reboot the appliance and it fixes it for about an hour.
The bottom line here is that Unitrends bought PHDVirtual for the interface, and seem to have zero interesting in getting it to work with Xenserver, the support techs I have dealt with have all but said as much. So I am being forced at this point to go somewhere else. I'll be testing Alike as soon as I get my head above water on some other projects, and I will most likely test some of the other backup options suggested here.
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@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
Thx for the update.
Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?
Curious if you've tried XO?
Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).
I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.
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@jrc said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
Thought I'd update this. After many hours with Unitrends we got it working, and I was hitting near 100% success. And then it just stopped again. And by stopped I mean completely stopped emailing me, running scheduled backups, and running backups are just stuck. Reboot the appliance and it fixes it for about an hour.
The bottom line here is that Unitrends bought PHDVirtual for the interface, and seem to have zero interesting in getting it to work with Xenserver, the support techs I have dealt with have all but said as much. So I am being forced at this point to go somewhere else. I'll be testing Alike as soon as I get my head above water on some other projects, and I will most likely test some of the other backup options suggested here.
I'd really recommend you try Xen Orchestra out. It's a very solid solution, with both a paid appliance (supported by the developer and team) or the community edition.
The version posted on the xen-orchestra.org website doesn't have the full set you'd need if you wanted to run production with it. You'd have to install it from my guide here on ML if you wanted that.
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@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
Thx for the update.
Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?
Curious if you've tried XO?
Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).
I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.
Why not perform the deduplication inside of your Storage Repository?
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@DustinB3403
You are using XS in production but using the free version of XO? -
@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@DustinB3403
You are using XS in production but using the free version of XO?Yep.
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@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
Thx for the update.
Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?
Curious if you've tried XO?
Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).
I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.
Why not perform the deduplication inside of your Storage Repository?
How does that translate to backups?
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@jrc I'm sorry that you're having this issue. We are committed to the success of all of our users, including those protecting XenServer. How can I help?
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@anthonyh
Is Quadric's support by tickets only or can you call them? -
@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
Thx for the update.
Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?
Curious if you've tried XO?
Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).
I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.
Why not perform the deduplication inside of your Storage Repository?
How does that translate to backups?
You want to dedup your data, not the number of backups you keep right?
Dedup means to remove the duplicate records from a data set. So if you have 5 backups, and in each of those you have 20 copies that are identical, it'll only keep 1 copy, and have a pointer record to restore the original to that location.
Same concept applies. If your VM's don't change between backups, why keep multiple copies of it?
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@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh
Is Quadric's support by tickets only or can you call them?It's ticket drive, unfortunately. If you call, they basically put in a ticket for you. However, they are very responsive. If the problem is complex enough, you can usually get them to do a remote session with a phone conference. 99% of my interaction with their support group is tickets.
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@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
Thx for the update.
Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?
Curious if you've tried XO?
Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).
I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.
Why not perform the deduplication inside of your Storage Repository?
How does that translate to backups?
You want to dedup your data, not the number of backups you keep right?
Dedup means to remove the duplicate records from a data set. So if you have 5 backups, and in each of those you have 20 copies that are identical, it'll only keep 1 copy, and have a pointer record to restore the original to that location.
Same concept applies. If your VM's don't change between backups, why keep multiple copies of it?
I only want to be backing up unique changed data, which is exactly what Alike does. If the same block of data exists between multiple VMs, it only backs up that block once and then builds references in a metadata database. So I'm able to back up 30 revisions of 40 TB of VMs with only 15 TB of space consumed on my backup datastore.
I don't think deduped backups and deduped SRs are the same. Just because you dedupe your SR (which, on our SAN, I am planning on doing) doesn't = deduped backups. At least in my environment...
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@anthonyh Ah ok so Alike does perform deduplication in the backup process and at backup time.
OK I understand a bit better now.
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@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
Thx for the update.
Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?
Curious if you've tried XO?
Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).
I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.
Why not perform the deduplication inside of your Storage Repository?
How does that translate to backups?
Depends on how the dedupe works, but basically it sees the repeating block data from your backups (which generally repeat heavily, like 99.9%) and only stores one copy of the blocks since many of them are the same as each other. This happens across systems, too, so the identical blocks from ten different copies of Windows would all dedupe down to one copy, since the OS portions of the OS are likely the same or largely the same across many systems.
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@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@anthonyh Ah ok so Alike does perform deduplication in the backup process and at backup time.
OK I understand a bit better now.
Yes, sir! It does block deduplication as well as compression. Works pretty well. Full VM restores can take a while though depending on the size of the virtual disks attached to the VM. File-level restores are pretty quick though.
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@KatieUnitrends said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@jrc I'm sorry that you're having this issue. We are committed to the success of all of our users, including those protecting XenServer. How can I help?
Hi Katie,
The issue is fundamentally a programming issue on your end. Xenserver seems to be an afterthought for you guys and as such is less than a priority. And I am honestly tired of having to fend off "The issue is on your end" from you support guys, when I have proved time and time again that it is not. On top of that the GUI is quite buggy, and I am also very tired of having to reinstall it to get it to work for a short period of time, just to have to do it all over again.
So yeah, I am not sure there is anything you can do to help me, but thanks for the offer.
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@jrc Jarrod - I'm sorry that the techs that you've worked with have made you feel this way. I'm looking into your cases to understand what has happened so far (since i was out on maternity leave for 3 months until just a few weeks ago), and will see what other options we have.
