Backup solutions for Xenserver
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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.
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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:
@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...
It's the SR of your backup, not the source, that determines the amount of storage for backups. If your SR for your live data is deduped, the backup system will de-dedupe that as it backs up.
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@jrc
I use the Unitrends virtual appliance, and I am still loving my Unitrends setup. I'm not sure what you mean that XS is an afterthought for Unitrends. They are 1 out of about 3 vendors that support XS. Every problem(2) I have had with it in the last 8 months has been my fault. I am only backing up about 10TB and 40 or so vms though, perhaps your environment is a lot larger.
This is with 1 gbit interface between xs and ueb
It does do dedupe very well. I usually get about 40-60MB/s backup speed on full backups. Agent backups seem to be a bit slower.
With XS and unitrends you have to have your network interfaces setup correctly in XS and the Unitrends appliance, or all sorts of stuff doesn't work well, or at all. You also need to make sure you aren't trying to backup too many vms at once on the same SR, which can lead to tapdisk unpause errors, tapdisk timeouts and other bad things. This seems to be a limitation of XS 6.5, not sure if 7 is better.
My UEB has an interface on Network 0(mgmt. iface) of the XS host. And one other that is on another subnet so I can easily connect to the web server. -
@momurda said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:
@jrc
I use the Unitrends virtual appliance, and I am still loving my Unitrends setup. I'm not sure what you mean that XS is an afterthought for Unitrends. They are 1 out of about 3 vendors that support XS. Every problem(2) I have had with it in the last 8 months has been my fault. I am only backing up about 10TB and 40 or so vms though, perhaps your environment is a lot larger.
This is with 1 gbit interface between xs and ueb
It does do dedupe very well. I usually get about 40-60MB/s backup speed on full backups. Agent backups seem to be a bit slower.
With XS and unitrends you have to have your network interfaces setup correctly in XS and the Unitrends appliance, or all sorts of stuff doesn't work well, or at all. You also need to make sure you aren't trying to backup too many vms at once on the same SR, which can lead to tapdisk unpause errors, tapdisk timeouts and other bad things. This seems to be a limitation of XS 6.5, not sure if 7 is better.
My UEB has an interface on Network 0(mgmt. iface) of the XS host. And one other that is on another subnet so I can easily connect to the web server.My environment is much smaller than yours, I have 12 or so VMs with about 6Tb of data. I do stagger the backups so that I do not go over the max connected VHDs to the appliance.
When you say that the network interface has to setup right, what do you mean? My appliance just uses the network gang I have (4x1Gb NICs) that is also used by all the other machines and as the management interface.
The main problem I've had was that it would error out during a backup, but that error would cause my SR to then fill up with snapshots, which then caused more errors in Unitrends since it would never detach the VHD or do any cleanup. When they looked through the logs they would then blame it on the Xenserver error and more or less stop supporting it at that point. The main error was SR_Backend_Failure_46, which I was able to trace back to the fact that the backups were failing.
Here's my setup:
2 Xenservers with an HP SAN for storage (connected via 8Gb/s fiber, in multipath mode). My backup target is a Dell server running Ubuntu with a single NFS share created. The appliance is using NFS as the protocol for backup.The latest issue is that the appliance just sort of stops backing things up, as well as sending out emails about any failures or anything. And when I go to look at it I can see there are 4 or 5 machines queued and one or two just sitting there at some percentage and just not moving forward at all. I have not really bothered to call them on this, since I suspect they're going to just go have me re-install and re-impliment it again (for the 6 or 7th time in a year), I have just not had the time with our new school opening up.
At this point, even if they were to fix it, I am not sure that I would trust it. I mean PHD Virtual worked perfectly and reliably, but Unitrends 9 has only worked for me a total of about a month out of the last 12, and I don't have the time to spend hours and hours on the phone asking them to fix something that is clearly broken on their end.
To their credit, they have really gone out of their way to try and help me on this. So their support is top notch, I just wish their product was better.
