It is common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and now Vembu has published Vembu BDR Essentials.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss.
When taking a backup with Veeam Backup & Replication, a VM snapshot is created to get a consistent state of the VM. The snapshot is taken prior the backup, and it is removed after the successful backup of the VM. The snapshot grows during its lifetime, and you should keep in mind, that you need some free space in the datastore for snapshots. This can be a problem, especially in case of multiple VM backups at a time, and if the VMs share the same datastore.
I have worked with a lot of backup software products during my career, but for the last years I have primarily worked with MicroFocus Data Protector (former HP OmniBack, HP Data Protector, or HPE Data Protector), and Veeam Backup & Replication. Data Protector was a great solution for traditional server environments, or when UNIX (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc.) compatibility was required. Features like Zero Downtime Backups, LAN-free or Direct SAN backups were available for many years.
Last week I had an interesting incident at a customer. The customer reported that one of multiple Veeam backup jobs jobs constantly failed.
The backup job included two VMs, and the backup of one of these VMs failed with this error:
Error: Failed to open VDDK disk [[VMDS-SAS-01] VMDC1/VMDC1_1.vmdk] ( is read-only mode - [true] ) Failed to open virtual disk Logon attempt with parameters [VC/ESX: [vcenter.domain.tld];Port: 443;Login: [ADAdministrator];VMX Spec: [moref=vm-59];Snapshot mor: [snapshot-20226];Transports: [san];Read Only: [true]] failed because of the following errors: Failed to open virtual disk Logon attempt with parameters VC/ESX: [vcenter.
When dealing with Microsoft Exchange restore requests, you will come across three different restore situations:
a database a single mailbox a single mailbox item (mail, calendar entry etc.) Restoring a complete database is not a complicated task, but restoring a single mailbox, or a single mailbox item, is. First, you need to restore the mailbox, that includes the desired mailbox, into a recovery database. Then you can restore the mailbox, or the mailbox items, from the recovery database.
3 days ago, on 13th October 2016, HPE has released patch bundle 9,08 for Data Protector 9. A patch bundle isn’t a directly installable version, instead it’s a bundle of patches and enhancements for a specific version of Data Protector, in this case Data Protector 9.
Beside fixes for discovered problems, a patch bundle includes also enhancements. There are some enhancements in this patch bundle, that have caught my attention particularly.
Recently, a customer has informed me, that copy sessions to encrypted devices failed, after he has made an update to Data Protector 9.07. The copy sessions failed with this error:
|Critical| From: BMA@<hostname> "" Time: <Date><Time> |90:6111| Error retrieving encryption key. The customer uses tape encryption. The destination for the backups is a HPE StoreOnce, and a post-backup copy creates a copy of the data on tape. Backup to disk was running fine, but the copy to tape failed immediately.
Today I got an email from HPE, which has informed me of the imminent end of support for HPE Data Protector 7.0x 8.0x. As of June 30, 2016, HPE will offer no new updates or patches for Data Protector 7.0x and 8.0x. This means that
Telephone and email support new security updates, and new product updates will be phased out. The self-help support will be continued until June 30, 2018. Self-help includes access to the knowledge base, current patches and access to known problems.
Last year in December, I updated the first customer from HPE Data Protector 9.04 to 9.05. Immediately after the first tests I noticed, that backups were made using the NBDSSL transport. I expected that the SAN transport would be used, because the prerequisites were met and it has worked until the update. I opened a case at the HPE support und I was advised to install the hotfix QCIM2A65619. With this hotfix, several files were replaced:
The Virtual Environment Integration (VE Integration) provides protection of VMs in virtual server environments. It is used o integrate HPE Data Protector with various virtualization environments, currently VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. For Citrix XenServer is a script solution available. I will focus on VMware vSphere.
What is possible? I took this table from the “HPE Data Protector 9.00 Integration Guide for Virtualization”.
Feature VE Integration Online backup ✓ Crash-consistent backup ✓ Application-consistent backup ✓ Granularity vmdk, vmx Full/ Incremental/ Differential ✓/ ✓/ ✓ Support for changed block tracking (CBT) ✓ Where does the Data Protector component need to be installed?
