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There can be different strategies to use Level 1 backup by the client.
In this article we will go over a 2 different strategies that are the most popular and recommended by our storage engineers.
You can of course adopt any type of strategy that can take advantage of the Level 1 backup datastore best fitted to your environment.
First we will briefly explain what Level 1 backup is and how it works.
Level 1 backup is essentialy a datastore which resides on a completely seperate NetApp cluster than your VMs will run on and is attached to your ESX host or hosts. You can then leverage the datastore to backup data or VMs. Although a failure is extremely rare on a NetApp Cluster you can rest assured that your backup Data is isolated on a seperate Cluster is available to restore from.
It should be noted that Level 1 backup is unmanaged in the sense that the customer is responsible to setup a backup strategy and maintain. We do not provide free support to configure or diagnose your backups. If you need managed Backup services you will need to look into our Level 2 and 3 services.
Example 1
In this example we will provide the highest recommended backup strategy to take advantage of Level 1 storage.
Summary: Clone VMs for base image. Create Backup Media Server. Install agents on production VMs to perform OS and Application aware backups.
- First thing we should perfrom is a cold clone (powered off clone) of each VM to the backup datastore. This will serve as a base system to restore our backups on in case the need for a restoration occurrs.
- Create Backup server VM: Next a new VM should be created residing on the backup datastore which we will use to perform the backups using backup agents on each production VM. Basically this VM will be our backup media server. All backup jobs will be controlled on this server and saved to its drives. You will need to select the appropriate OS and backup application whether open source or closed source to perform the backup functions.
- Remember to size the backup media servers VM correctly when creating it to accomodate the size and retention period required.
- The backup media server VM should have its jobs scheduled to perform a full backup and incremental as needed on each production VM.
- Note remember that applications such as Database, exchange mail, etc.. type applications need regular applicaiton aware backups to commit logs and keep consistent.
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