Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?
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@FATeknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
I like the idea!
What are you proposing, can you give a little more detail?Same thing that I keep talking about.... what I call "DevOps style backups". Identify your stateful data, back only it up. It's how I handle most systems.
Like if you have a traditional web server (LAMP) you don't need to back up the server, only a monthly backup of the /var/www directory and a daily database backup. Neither requires special tools or anything. Both generally make tiny files. Your 16GB server backup is easily 50MB. Compress that before or after transfer. Transfer to a backup system and/or directly to a cloud host.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@DustinB3403 said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
Agent and Agentless backup solutions have always had a place. Agent based backups are great for active database systems, so they can stop any write process to the database, take a snap and then continue.
Agentless can do that too.
True, I didn't say they couldn't though either. . .
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@scottalanmiller said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@FATeknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
I like the idea!
What are you proposing, can you give a little more detail?Same thing that I keep talking about.... what I call "DevOps style backups". Identify your stateful data, back only it up. It's how I handle most systems.
Like if you have a traditional web server (LAMP) you don't need to back up the server, only a monthly backup of the /var/www directory and a daily database backup. Neither requires special tools or anything. Both generally make tiny files. Your 16GB server backup is easily 50MB. Compress that before or after transfer. Transfer to a backup system and/or directly to a cloud host.
Ok, what if I have a Windows 20xx SQL vm with 500gb worth of data or a VOIP vm with 15gb of data, how would I handle this "DevOps" style?
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@FATeknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@FATeknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
I like the idea!
What are you proposing, can you give a little more detail?Same thing that I keep talking about.... what I call "DevOps style backups". Identify your stateful data, back only it up. It's how I handle most systems.
Like if you have a traditional web server (LAMP) you don't need to back up the server, only a monthly backup of the /var/www directory and a daily database backup. Neither requires special tools or anything. Both generally make tiny files. Your 16GB server backup is easily 50MB. Compress that before or after transfer. Transfer to a backup system and/or directly to a cloud host.
Ok, what if I have a Windows 20xx SQL vm with 500gb worth of data or a VOIP vm with 15gb of data, how would I handle this "DevOps" style?
Same, nothing really changes with size. It's still "Just one thing to back up".
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Voicemails are easy, rsync really rules there.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@FATeknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@FATeknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
I like the idea!
What are you proposing, can you give a little more detail?Same thing that I keep talking about.... what I call "DevOps style backups". Identify your stateful data, back only it up. It's how I handle most systems.
Like if you have a traditional web server (LAMP) you don't need to back up the server, only a monthly backup of the /var/www directory and a daily database backup. Neither requires special tools or anything. Both generally make tiny files. Your 16GB server backup is easily 50MB. Compress that before or after transfer. Transfer to a backup system and/or directly to a cloud host.
Ok, what if I have a Windows 20xx SQL vm with 500gb worth of data or a VOIP vm with 15gb of data, how would I handle this "DevOps" style?
Same, nothing really changes with size. It's still "Just one thing to back up".
I assume you just use a process to backup the DB and call it done. Then you have a script the builds a new VM as needed, retire data and done.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
@FATeknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
I like the idea!
What are you proposing, can you give a little more detail?Same thing that I keep talking about.... what I call "DevOps style backups". Identify your stateful data, back only it up. It's how I handle most systems.
Like if you have a traditional web server (LAMP) you don't need to back up the server, only a monthly backup of the /var/www directory and a daily database backup. Neither requires special tools or anything. Both generally make tiny files. Your 16GB server backup is easily 50MB. Compress that before or after transfer. Transfer to a backup system and/or directly to a cloud host.
Another thing that helps here is keeping data on a backing store that you can mount. Web server data can be mounted from a share and only that system needs backed up. Then the web server itself can be built/destroyed at will and has no affect on the data itself.
Treating whole VMs as containers gives a lot of flexibility. It's obviously not as efficient with resources but it really lessens the burden of administration.
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Yup, and database clusters so that you only restore data, rather than capacity ,should the entire cluster fail, not just a node.
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I've been backing up VMs at the host level for a while.
More recently, also testing RCT based backups through SCDPM MBS (2016):
https://mangolassi.it/topic/13232/scdpm-2016-using-mbs
It's backing up almost 8TB worth of VMs in an hour or so. Fully browseable and recoverable to a lot of options.
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@Francesco-Provino another thing. I have vm managed by a supplier. With multi tenant a clear separation of duties must be defined.
In our case the local sys admin is in charge to keep everything updated. In this scenatio hypervisor level backup helps not entering the vm to backup it. Surely less efficient especially with db which have their own backup procedures. -
@fateknollogee said in Should backup and virtualization infrastructure be decoupled?:
I like the idea!
What are you proposing, can you give a little more detail?Use bacula/borgbackup/veeam endpoint or just plain remote rsnpshot, plus database-specific tools… and, of course, take a full backup if the VM once in a while for quick disaster recovery, but without all of the fancy incremental-dedupe stuff.
