Advice on backup for windows fileservers
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Hi,
I need some advice, We have several windows based fileservers running as a vm, most of the time they have a disksize of 2tb. These fileservers server FSlogix profile disks, these files are under heavy io. This io makes it difficult to do proper backups. Since we migrated to XCP-NG we did this backups with CBT based backups on Alike Backup. As they are no longer supporting there product we cannot rely on there support. The appliance used for this backups is giving more and more problems and restores are also not always working as required. We need to switch to a different solution for this.
Currently CBT backups in XOA are almost rocksolid, but still we see some issues now and then what causes a new full, for this kind of vms this does take almost a day to create a new full and it requires a lot of backup storage (no deduplication). So that is not ideal.
Is anyone having the same sort of problem and how did u solve it? What backup solutions could help us out? Anyone have experience with CBT in XOA with vms this big?
Another problem of the high io is the coalesce process for these backups, vms this size take a long time to coalesce and with cbt enabled with purge data it needs to freeze the vm for some time, as the io load is high it does not always manage to coalesce the disk and runs into a timeout.
Hope anyone could give me some advise on this!
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The latest patch planned will help to reduce the false positives doing a full. In your case, using an agent inside the VM is maybe preferable where a VM backup of such volume + those requirements isn't really a good fit.
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@olivierlambert thank u for the quick reply, i was also thinking about agent based backups, do u have any experience with a good tool for this? We prefer working with opensource tooling but if it's a paid tool i also have no problems with it. Maybe u know how some other customers deal with this kind of backups!
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@olivierlambert for now we will go with Nakivo as we allready have a good experience with them, i will explore te agent based backups there to see if they can help to improve the backups of these vms. thanks again for the prompt response!
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What are your needs for a backup? A full bare-metal recovery of the server/vm, or just some of the files on it?
If XCP-ng/XOA backups are too slow, why not separate the main data into a second disk mounted over iSCSI inside Windows. You'd still need to manage backups somehow though.
You mentioned open source. One option is https://www.urbackup.org/. We have been looking at it as a replacement for Acronis for bare-metal machines, but not yet made a decision.
If you just need to keep the files, you could easily make a script that creates a VSS snapshot and runs robocopy to some remote destination. I do this on several servers, and then I manage retention on the remote location separately.
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@Forza said in Advice on backup for windows fileservers:
You mentioned open source. One option is https://www.urbackup.org/. We have been looking at it as a replacement for Acronis for bare-metal machines, but not yet made a decision.
Wow I feel like I've gone back in time. UrBackup is a really solid solution for agent based backups. I've used it, though I had a few challenges, namely mobile devices which was my target at the time and weren't on the same LAN.
Anything over the internet is just going to be slow. But for using this to take an additional data only backup of a Windows or Linux VM would work well, though I don't know how well it would work to take a block level backup.
I think it's still being developed too.
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@DustinB thanks all, the agent based backups seem to work the way we need, we removed the older alike backup appliances so fully on xoa backup now. I saw alike is going opensource but almost no activity on the github account, i expect that the product will discontinue as it is allready pretty outdated, nice chance for XOA to fill the gap.
