Multiple vmProtects with one vCenter

anybody know?

Hi BL460c,

Yes, it is possible, however you should remember to disable vCenter integration feature (option during installation) on one of the installed vmProtect Agents (otherwise there might be problems) and ensure that each of the Agents is backing up a dedicated set of VMs, so that there is no overlap. Each vmProtect Agent should be managed separately of course.

Thank you.
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Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

The issue becomes when you have vCenter moving thing around. Do you vMotion at all? In order for things to work, you'll need to disable things like DRS - basiclly map a vmP to a host, and only backup what's on it. The setup uses vCenter integration to handle when things are moved between hosts.

The issue is that vCenter functionality is a 'do everything against the vCenter' where it should be a 'use vCenter to find things and then speak with the host'. From a license side, if you have 4 hosts x2 CPU's & 1 vCenter, you'd setup vmP1 agent with all 8 CPU licenses. If to speed things up, adding a vmP2 would have to work against a specific host, and would need it's own CPU licenses.

Thanks.

We use vmotion, DRS etc. so its probably not the best option for us

So this issue would be if 2x vmProtect try and connect to a single host at the same time? does the vmware API not allow this?

say you had the following setup

1x vcenter
2x hosts with 2 CPU each
10 VMs - VM1, VM2 ... VM10 etc

I would then need 4 CPU licenses

If I then ran 2x vmProtect Appliance Agents and used the first one to backup VM1 to VM5 and the second VM6 to VM10

if those VMs were vmotion around between hosts, say

VM1,VM3,VM7,VM8,VM10 on Host 1

and the rest on Host 2

vmProtect would be unable to back them up as the the additional vmProtect might conflict?

So lets back up and chat why you're doing backup, and trying to get more than 5 concurrent jobs. Let's start with the target of said backups - does it have the bandwidth to handle 2x the load currently? What is the source datastore for the VM's and can you dump data 2x faster than current? If not, then there are issues that need to be solved that may improve your backup times (which would be helpful to know, plus your backup window).

You may be better off doing replication jobs, and doing them more frequently. Then backup the replication one a day at any hour, since it's not running.

What is the purpose of the backups - long term archive of what data was, or for service restoration in the event of a crash or other failures?

My thinking was this

we separate our backups into Tiers and each Tier has a different backup scheme

here is a rough example

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GOLD - Once per hour - contains 5 critical VMs

SILVER - Once per day - contains 50 VMs

BRONZE - Once per week contains 25 VMs where Data doesn't change alot
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If I was to have 1 vmProtect instance come midnight each day its trying to backup 55 VMs (GOLD and Silver as its the once per day and each hour)

then come Sunday at midnight (or whenever vmProtect deems the week is over) its trying to backup 80 VMs at the same time (GOLD SILVER BRONZE) which will take a long time

If I could split that into 3 separate appliances backing up to separate TIB files on separate LUNS

GOLD.TIB - LUN 1
SILVER.TIB - LUN 2
BRONZE.TIB - LUN 3

Although in that example the Silver TIB file would be massive and perhaps go past the 16TB NTFS limit where we dump the files :)

Then from here our Tape library can pickup the files from the SMB path and push them to tape.

Joe Towner wrote:

The issue becomes when you have vCenter moving thing around. Do you vMotion at all? In order for things to work, you'll need to disable things like DRS - basiclly map a vmP to a host, and only backup what's on it. The setup uses vCenter integration to handle when things are moved between hosts.

The issue is that vCenter functionality is a 'do everything against the vCenter' where it should be a 'use vCenter to find things and then speak with the host'. From a license side, if you have 4 hosts x2 CPU's & 1 vCenter, you'd setup vmP1 agent with all 8 CPU licenses. If to speed things up, adding a vmP2 would have to work against a specific host, and would need it's own CPU licenses.

A little correction here: the "vCenter integration" feature in vmProtect is basically just a GUI one, i.e. it provides vmProtect UI from vSphere client connected to vCenter. The DRS and vMotion of VMs is supported by vmProtect even if "vCenter integration" is disabled (all you have to do is to register vCenter in Configure->ESXi hosts). This means that vmProtect can detect the fact of VMs vMotion and the backup task will find the moved VMs and will back them up, no matter which host these VMs were migrated to (again "vCenter integration" feature has nothing to deal with this).

From licensing perspective as long as you run 2 Appliances on the same vCenter you won't need double amount of licenses - you can legally use the same licenses on both of these appliances (since you will be managing the same hosts).

Thank you.

I knew I got something mixed up there. Thanks for the correction Vasily. Just to confirm if you have 5 appliances, all pointed at the same vCenter to achieve the threading the OP was looking for, there is not a need for double or multiples of licenses, just the total number of CPU sockets of the ESX/i hosts..

BL460c, what's your SAN setup like? It may be worth setting up a separate ESXi box literally just to run the number of agents you are looking for with a SAN adapter (FC?) and a 10gb NIC to back feed your tape loader.

The VMs run of a Lefthand MultiSite Cluster with 10GB iscsi

but they are backed up to a HP Server with 24x SATA drives and a SAS connected tape library this comes across only a 4GB Link (bonded NICS)

The actual vmProtect agents will run (if we decide to purchase we are currently in trial stage) on our BL460c blade server cluster which all is all connected via 10GB Virtual Connect so bandwith won't be the problem

It will be the actual backup server which is the slowest link (we might look into 10GB NICS in there)

at this stage we are just in a trial period and I was wanting to know if this was even possible before I setup a test of it all

I am in the same boat, looking at doing exactly this

I am going to trial the new vmProtect 9 tommorrow which includes a central management console apparently.

My question is,

If I have multiple Agents (Linux Appliances) can I activate the vcenter integration on all of them?

so that I can see the backup jobs from each agent?

Or only on one of the agents?

I am not looking at using the right click menus in vi client, just the notifications of the jobs, progress etc and last backup date in the annotations.

Hi Stylus Pilot,

The vCenter integration can be enabled with one vmProtect Agent only, though the items you outlined can be seen through the Centralized Dashboard feature included in vmProtect 9 (except for the progress of the tasks and the annotations update).

Also I'd like to share a quick tip which might be helpful: if you set up e-mail notifications for the backup tasks and leave the subject field empty, then each notification will automatically include the vmProtect agent name + type of task + result of it into the subject. This can let you track down and sort these notifications from multiple agents easily.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

So does the Centralised Agent offer vcenter integration

ie all the agents talk to the centralised console, and the central console puts the progress, annotations etc into vcenter?

If not that is my feature request for v9 as whats the point of many agents under one central console if they cant all be used with vcenter like one agent can

Hi Stylus Pilot,

Thank you for the suggestion, it's really appreciated. Having some kind of centralized vCenter integration (add vCenter plug-in which gathers progresses from multiple agents) is indeed something helpful and we will definitely look into it.

For now the backup tasks status can be tracked from centralized dashboard console (new in vmP9) for all vmProtect agents registered in this dashboard, but not from vCenter interface.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

+1 here sounds like a good idea to centralise all Events and then forward those events across into vcenter

Count me in on this. I just hope that serious thought will be put in to this.