Agent and Agentless Backups
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@scottalanmiller Im sorry, but what? I have restored about 20 vms here the last 2.5 years for reasons. Every single one was agentless, and took half the time to restore over agent because I didnt have to recreate the vm.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
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@momurda said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller Im sorry, but what? I have restored about 20 vms here the last 2.5 years for reasons. Every single one was agentless, and took half the time to restore over agent because I didnt have to recreate the vm.
How long is it taking you to create a VM? Why is that taking so long? Or are your restores like 2-3 minutes?
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At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
It was decided above my paygrade that what we got with XOCE (15 minute interval) and was limited only by the network (and hypervisors) that it was good enough.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Right, which is why I didn't.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
But agentless did, 100% no issues. So there is a case that agentless worked, without a hitch, met every requirement that the business had, and met the business needs.
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Ridiculous anecdote, but we recently implemented an agent based system in minutes to keep us protected while waiting for support of an agentless system to get it working again. Means nothing, but a useful example that the assumptions that agentless makes it easy and agent makes it hard are just assumptions. In the real world, either can be easy or hard.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
I looked at it personally (and have already stated this in the previous post) was because the hypervisors we had (and likely network) could only produce Continous Replications every 15 minutes.
This was "good enough" from a business perspective.
Adding UrBackup on top of that, meant I would need double the backup space available, to protect for a possible 15 minute down time. Which the employees and work isn't so valuable that it justified the spend for that much more storage.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
But agentless did, 100% no issues. So there is a case that agentless worked, without a hitch, met every requirement that the business had, and met the business needs.
Are you sure? Or did the workloads just not get evaluated? This is my point, @CCWTech and I just had a meeting with a firm that used agentless and said exactly what you said, but we were able to show them that the one thing that they cared about most wasn't properly protected and that the belief that agentless would "just cover it" had put them in a dangerous position. Unstable databases, the only thing tha tthey were bothering to pay for the backup for in the first place.
My point is, there is no reasonable way that you have all workloads that agentless can handle on its own (or agent based, I'm sure), but if you used agents, likely you'd have considered the workload needs but when doing agentless, it's become the norm to ignore the stability issues.
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Using an agent is like using the HyperV role on top of Windows Server.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
I looked at it personally (and have already stated this in the previous post) was because the hypervisors we had (and likely network) could only produce Continous Replications every 15 minutes.
This was "good enough" from a business perspective.
Adding UrBackup on top of that, meant I would need double the backup space available, to protect for a possible 15 minute down time. Which the employees and work isn't so valuable that it justified the spend for that much more storage.
In that case, why not only use the UrBackup? Seems like the agentless system isn't doing as much as an agent based would do? I feel like you made the case that, in that situation, agents were more robust. And politics, not business need, led to agentless.
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@momurda said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
Using an agent is like using the HyperV role on top of Windows Server.
It's really not. But this is exactly why my article above is important. It's become a solid believe that agents are bad, and agentless is good. It's stopped being an evaluation of needs and protection and just a "this is how it is done because it's the popular new thing." Agents remain very important, and very powerful. Agent based is a useful tool, but more limited and because of market pressures, tends to be very misleading.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
But agentless did, 100% no issues. So there is a case that agentless worked, without a hitch, met every requirement that the business had, and met the business needs.
Are you sure? Or did the workloads just not get evaluated? This is my point, @CCWTech and I just had a meeting with a firm that used agentless and said exactly what you said, but we were able to show them that the one thing that they cared about most wasn't properly protected and that the belief that agentless would "just cover it" had put them in a dangerous position. Unstable databases, the only thing tha tthey were bothering to pay for the backup for in the first place.
My point is, there is no reasonable way that you have all workloads that agentless can handle on its own (or agent based, I'm sure), but if you used agents, likely you'd have considered the workload needs but when doing agentless, it's become the norm to ignore the stability issues.
Again, that is a customer who fell into a sales trap and didn't do their own job, or pay for a proper consult. You're lumping shitty customer decisions into a conversation about the merits of two different approaches and stating that anything that uses one approach is "risky" without evaluating the other options.
As much as Olivier is price breaking the XCP-NG world with his pricing models the solution and XOCE work just fine for 99% of the cases that take the time to consider it.
I know for a fact you haven't actually gone and tested XCP-NG or XOCE due to Oliviers business practices, but it is a solid solution as a whole when considered in context of this conversation.
Ignoring who makes it or what it is under the hood.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
I looked at it personally (and have already stated this in the previous post) was because the hypervisors we had (and likely network) could only produce Continous Replications every 15 minutes.
This was "good enough" from a business perspective.
Adding UrBackup on top of that, meant I would need double the backup space available, to protect for a possible 15 minute down time. Which the employees and work isn't so valuable that it justified the spend for that much more storage.
In that case, why not only use the UrBackup? Seems like the agentless system isn't doing as much as an agent based would do? I feel like you made the case that, in that situation, agents were more robust. And politics, not business need, led to agentless.
Because the agent based backup meant that to recover the entire guest, I would have to mount a special ISO, it wasn't nearly as straightforward as "restore this backup from 15 minutes ago to Host 2".
This was the approach of "we want the receptionist to be able to do this should you be on vacation" type of decision. So simple that you could screw up by simply being a moron. Granted only the IT department had the access required to make these kinds of changes, an even there it was with "least-access".
I was evaluating it only to offset the risk of "opps I deleted that file 8 minutes ago, can you restore it" to which the business decided to tell the employee, no you aren't that valuable.
The coverage of that 15 minute window, simply wasn't worth the added cost, not when considering the cost of added storage. It wasn't a question of "Agent does it better" as it didn't do it better in the big case of "we're afraid this VM might die because of sunk-cost decisions years ago".
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
And a wonderful kicker to it is that I was even able to mount my agentless backups as a disks in my VM and restore individual files.
Or the entire VM in a matter of minutes, be it AD or the file server.
That's a HORRIBLE way to deal with file restores. But agentless is better than that. Agentless has no such limitations. If it did, that would be the big killer right there.
A little late to the party... but for the record, you definitely do NOT have to mount a snapshot and do all that manual stuff. You can do it straight from the XOCE web interface
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
Also, I have no idea what you're talking about here, agentless DID do everything that we needed, guaranteed.
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Finally a clear and simple explanation of agent and agentless backup modes.
Also I do believe in the emerging devops/stateless way of backups regardless of the company size as it depends on the person, paired with golden image and your set, i dont know why people deem this way as mission impossible, and even without golden image, centos 7 installs on servers in like 5 mins ? then you can install salt-minion and apply state from the master. I know this does not apply on every server role but hay it is newer way of thinking and can work with people that document their work, and testing the backup is very easy on test VM.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
Ah, Datto has added agentless now, but it was doing this before adding that.
Agentless backup for Datto specifically is only for VMware environments not Hyperv.
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As much as I like to argue with @scottalanmiller I have to agree that usually agents are easier.
Because the agent based backup meant that to recover the entire guest, I would have to mount a special ISO, it wasn't nearly as straightforward as "restore this backup from 15 minutes ago to Host 2".
That is in no way a requirement of agent based systems. This sounds more like there isn't a reliable way to reproduce a system and the data isn't on a separate volume. Make sure the systems can be rebuilt immediately and you can just reattach the data and be done.
Even with something as simple as ReaR, you define your skeleton volumes you want backed up and include that in your template.
Example (I'll use Ansible since that's what I know):
The template would have this in it:
BACKUP_PROG_INCLUDE=('{{ backup_dirs | join("' '") }}')You'd have a list (in this case called
backup_dirs) that gets iterated over:backup_dirs: - /home/* - /data/* - /var/www/html/*That
backup_dirslist is specific to each machine when it's created.The agent based stuff is really simple because it can very easily be specific for each machine and always be specific when the systems are built without any work after the initial set up.
