Today I had a customer call, where a Exchange 2010 backup repeatedly failed. HPE Data Protector was unable to create a differential or incremental backup. For each database, the following error was logged:
[Minor] From: OB2BAR_E2010_BAR@exchangeserver.domain.tld "MS Exchange 2010+ Server" Time: 21.03.2016 20:00:27 [170:313] One or more copies of database DATABASE are already being backed up in a different session. Interestingly, there was no other backup session running. But the night before, the backup jobs failed because of a network failure.
HPE Data Protector stores multiple backup objects on a single Catalyst store item. A backup object can be a volume, a mount point, a database or a virtual machine. You can have multiple backup objects per backup client. If your filesystem backup job has four backup clients, and each client has two volumes, the backup job will contain 8 backup objects. Another example is a single database of a Microsoft SQL or Oracle database server (instance).
I’m using Veeam Backup & Replication (currently 8.0 Update 3) in my lab environment to backup some of my VMs to a HP StoreOnce VSA. The VMs reside in a NFS datastore on a Synology DS414slim NAS, the StoreOnce VSA is located in a local datastore (RAID 5 with SAS disks) on one of my ESXi hosts. The Veeam backup server is a VM and it’s also the Veeam Backup Proxy.
Some days ago, I blogged about the new HP StoreOnce software release 3.13.0. This release included several fixes. One fix wasn’t mentioned by me, although it’s interesting.
Fixed issue where Windows 2012 R2 built-in native backup was not supported with 3.12.x software (BZ 61232) Windows Server Backup (WSB) is part of Windows Server since Windows Server 2008. WSB can create bare metal backups and recover those backups. The same applies to system state backups, file level backups, Hyper-V VMs, Exchange etc.
Since september 2015, the latest version of HP StoreOnce backup system software is available. The latest release 3.13.0 is available for HP StoreOnce VSA, 6500, B6200 multi-node and all single node systems running software version 3.x. This also applies to some D2D 2500, 4100 and 4300 single-node backup systems running software versions 2.x. Make sure that you take a look into customer notice c03729283 for details on performing the conversion.
While upgrading a rather old (but very stable) Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 installation to 8.0 Update 3 (with intermediate step to 6.5), I ran into a curious error. Right after the welcome screen, this error message
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
appeared. A closer look into the BackupSetup.log (you can find this log in the %temp% dir. Just enter %temp% into the Explorer address bar) resulted in this very interesting log entry:
While I was playing with my shiny, new HP StoreOnce VSA in my lab, I noticed a curious behavior. I created a NAS share for some tests with Veeam Backup & Replication. Creating a new share is nothing fancy. You can create a share in two ways:
using the GUI, or using the CLI So I created a new share:
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Nothing special, as you can see.
When talking to SMB customers, most of them don’t want to talk about their backup strategy. It’s paradox: They know that data loss can ruin their business, but they don’t want to invest money into a fully tested recovery concept (I try to avoid the word “backup concept” - Recovery is the key). Because of tight budgets and lacking knowledge, many customers use traditional concepts in a virtualized world. This often ends in traditional backup applications with agents deployed into guest OS, and backups that are written to tape (or worse: On USB disks).
A free StoreOnce VSA, like the well known 1 TB StoreVirtual VSA? That would be too cool to be real. But it is real! Since February, HP offers a free 1 TB version of their StoreOnce VSA. I totally missed this announcement, but thanks to Calvin Zito I noticed it today:
Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA http://t.co/71464n0iZp
— IT Godfather (@CalvinZito) April 19, 2015 The link leads to another blog post from Ashwin Shetty (Can you protect your data for free?
After installing the Data Protector patch bundle 8.13, you may ran into this error when trying to restore data from a HP StoreOnce appliance.
[Normal] From: RSM@dpcm.lab.local "" Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:10 Restore session 2014/12/04-8 started. [Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]" Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:12 STARTING Media Agent "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]" [Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]" Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:13 Loading medium from slot 192.168.200.101Store_1257902bf_54796efc_04f4_005c to device D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580] [Major] From: RMA@fileserver.
