We have few queries regarding Dataminer VM image backup & replication as we’ll be using Dataminer VM image backup for restore & vSphere replication for recovering VM in alternate site in case of Data center failure.
Business requirements:
DR Site replication of both members of a DataMiner team using VMware Replication Manager. This requires quiescing during the snapshot.
Full image based backup of both team DataMiner servers in a team (including MS SQL database) using Avamar. This requires quiescing during the snapshot.
Queries
What are the best practices details for:
- DataMiner Backup & Restore
- DataMiner Cross-Site DR Replication using VMware vSphere Replication Site Recovery Site Recovery Version 8.5.0, Build 19282257
- How can we avoid quiescing contention if snapshotting for Image based backup and Replication. Also when both SRM and Image based backups are running at the same time they interfere with each other and backups would fail
Below are the details of software packages currently being used
VMware Products:
vCenter Version: 6.7.0, 19299595
VM version 11
VMware Tools: Running, version:11296 (Current)
vSphere Replication 8.5.0.12277 build 19282255
OS: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter 10.0 <X64> (Build 14393: ) (Hypervisor)
Dataminer: DataMiner (9.6.0.0-10257-CU23)
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP3)
(KB5003279) - 13.0.6300.2 (X64) Aug 7 2021 01:20:37
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation
Developer Edition (64-bit) on
Backup Product:
Avamar 19.x
-I can add some feedback related to your first question,
A best practice for a DataMiner Backup/Restore can be followed in our help, mainly the restore procedure is quite important:
Restoring a DataMiner Agent | DataMiner Docs
The main takeaway here is that we can't take into account what was added/chagned between the backup restore so it's necessary to "clean" the DMA setup and upgrade/downgrade to the correct version before you restore the DMA
-Related to the vSphere questions, i know that already several users successfully used VM Snapshot restore to restore DMA setups. We also recommend to take a snapshot before every upgrade: Upgrading a DMA/DMS - DataMiner Dojo
However i don't have much details on the best practices within vSphere. One thing to note, we saw that the VM platform/underlying hardware can struggle when you take a DM Backup at the same time as a VM Snapshot. The issues we noticed were mainly due to disk access. We take a backup all at the same time on every DataMiner, this can cause quite some disk load, VM snapshots can do this as well. So combining those 2 can be cumbersome.
One of the things we can recommend if this would be the case, our backups are triggered by a windows scheduled task which easily can be reconfigured to another time per DataMiner in the Task Scheduler of Windows. However as soon as you would change the backup time in cube this will be overwritten again, the feature to have different timings in the Cube interface isn't implemented yet.
Hi Andrew,
I’ll chase some people here internally to know if they have some feedback on this or know how some users are configuring this that already used vSphere for your use cases but this is currently not our(/my) expertise since these questions are not really DataMiner specific but I’ll do my best to find some answers
Thanks a lot Marlies.
Thanks Marlies,
Can anyone help to take a look at the 2nd and 3rd questions?