Backup Central

I work for Sony Playstation and we are moving a racked stand-alone Master & Media server configuration to a new data center.
I am on version 7.1 and am considering virtualizing the entire infrastructure. Has anyone successfully done this yet and did you run into any gotchas?

Regards

Brian

Hey Brian,
 
We have a customer that has virtualized 10 media servers and haven’t seen any issues with performance. The master is a physical server.
Two things I can immediately think of: Resource contention of the VMs and any features that move the VMs around to optimize resources (VMware does this with Distributed Resource Scheduler [DRS]).
 
Unless it’s a pretty small domain, and there isn’t a need to virtualize, I would opt for physical servers. Maybe I’m just a traditionalist.
 
-Rusty
 
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu ([email]veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu[/email]) [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu ([email]veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu[/email])] On Behalf Of Brian_Thomas < at > PlayStation.Sony.com ([email]Brian_Thomas < at > PlayStation.Sony.com[/email])
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 5:38 PM
To: VERITAS-BU < at > MAILMAN.ENG.AUBURN.EDU ([email]VERITAS-BU < at > MAILMAN.ENG.AUBURN.EDU[/email])
Subject: [Veritas-bu] NetBackup (Virtualized Master & Media Servers)
 
I work for Sony Playstation and we are moving a racked stand-alone Master & Media server configuration to a new data center.
I am on version 7.1 and am considering virtualizing the entire infrastructure.  Has anyone successfully done this yet and did you run into any gotchas?

Regards

Brian

Guys,

Best would be created a cluster active passive for NBU MASTER

Keep your physical machine as passive so that it can take over in worst case scenarios.

Anurag

From: rusty.major < at > sungard.com
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:35:12 -0600
To: Brian_Thomas < at > playstation.sony.com; VERITAS-BU < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] NetBackup (Virtualized Master & Media Servers)

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Hey Brian,

We have a customer that has virtualized 10 media servers and haven’t seen any issues with performance. The master is a physical server.
Two things I can immediately think of: Resource contention of the VMs and any features that move the VMs around to optimize resources (VMware does this with Distributed Resource Scheduler [DRS]).

Unless it’s a pretty small domain, and there isn’t a need to virtualize, I would opt for physical servers. Maybe I’m just a traditionalist.

-Rusty

From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu ([email]veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu[/email]) [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu ([email]veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu[/email])] On Behalf Of Brian_Thomas < at > PlayStation.Sony.com ([email]Brian_Thomas < at > PlayStation.Sony.com[/email])
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 5:38 PM
To: VERITAS-BU < at > MAILMAN.ENG.AUBURN.EDU ([email]VERITAS-BU < at > MAILMAN.ENG.AUBURN.EDU[/email])
Subject: [Veritas-bu] NetBackup (Virtualized Master & Media Servers)

I work for Sony Playstation and we are moving a racked stand-alone Master & Media server configuration to a new data center.
I am on version 7.1 and am considering virtualizing the entire infrastructure. Has anyone successfully done this yet and did you run into any gotchas?

Regards

Brian


_______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

We recently faced this question when designing a brand new data centre. We decided there was not much point in virtualising the media servers, since they are just I/O machines and will probably (hopefully) saturate SOME part of the infrastructure they're running on, be it inbound network, outband I/O to disk/tape, or the bus on the server's motherboard. The ONLY physical (non-virtualised) servers in this new data centre are our NBU media servers.

The NBU master however is virtual, and we recently did a site fail-over test of the master using VMware SRM, and it worked just fine. (Cisco UCS, VMware 4.1, NBU 7.1, RHEL6)

As another data point, I just completed vSphere 5 training this week, and the very knowledgeable instructor said "These days, the only thing that obviously shouldn't be virtualised is backup servers".

Cheers
Dean

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:37 AM, <Brian_Thomas < at > playstation.sony.com ([email]Brian_Thomas < at > playstation.sony.com[/email])> wrote:
I work for Sony Playstation and we are moving a racked stand-alone Master & Media server configuration to a new data center.
I am on version 7.1 and am considering virtualizing the entire infrastructure.  Has anyone successfully done this yet and did you run into any gotchas?

Regards

Brian

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu ([email]Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu[/email])
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

Oh, and I forgot to say that the virtualised master server doesn't do ANY backups, other than it's own catalog backups.



On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 9:31 PM, Dean <dean.deano < at > gmail.com ([email]dean.deano < at > gmail.com[/email])> wrote:
We recently faced this question when designing a brand new data centre. We decided there was not much point in virtualising the media servers, since they are just I/O machines and will probably (hopefully) saturate SOME part of the infrastructure they're running on, be it inbound network, outband I/O to disk/tape, or the bus on the server's motherboard. The ONLY physical (non-virtualised) servers in this new data centre are our NBU media servers.

The NBU master however is virtual, and we recently did a site fail-over test of the master using VMware SRM, and it worked just fine. (Cisco UCS, VMware 4.1, NBU 7.1, RHEL6)

As another data point, I just completed vSphere 5 training this week, and the very knowledgeable instructor said "These days, the only thing that obviously shouldn't be virtualised is backup servers".

Cheers
Dean

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:37 AM, <Brian_Thomas < at > playstation.sony.com ([email]Brian_Thomas < at > playstation.sony.com[/email])> wrote:


I work for Sony Playstation and we are moving a racked stand-alone Master & Media server configuration to a new data center.
I am on version 7.1 and am considering virtualizing the entire infrastructure.  Has anyone successfully done this yet and did you run into any gotchas?

Regards

Brian



_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu ([email]Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu[/email])
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu