Enterprise Backup Solution integration with RHEV or RHEV Manager
We are investigating a tightly-coupled backup integration with RHEV and RHEV Manager. We would like to have better options than simply backing each VM up as client.
What are you folks using?
Was it highly customized?
Are you pleased with the current (Jan 2013) ISV support of the backup product and RHEV?
I know that Acronis is a strong Red Hat partner and I am starting to find some documentation from Symantec indicating support for Netbackup with RHEV. I am hoping to see something from Tivoli, Commvault, Symantec in addition to the great products that Acronis utilizes.
Thanks!
Responses
Besides what is mentioned on marketplace.redhat.com, I suggest you contact your favourite backup vendor directly and request they provide a solution for RHEV, this works quite well in terms of generating interest. I'll be happy to talk to any interested ISV
Guru
6888 points
Hey Dan - you actually made me wonder, is there an "official process" to engage Red Hat and another ISV for a product enhancement? I assume Acronis went out on a limb and made the pieces work (and is fortunately paying dividends to them now, probably).
I am surprised that with all of the momentum behind RHEV and with some of the "heavy hitters" using RHEV as their strategic virtualization platform that there is not a stronger Backup integration. In particular IBM, who uses KVM for their smartcloud (and I would guess some variant of oVirt or RHEV for the manager). They certainly have one of the best Enterprise Backup Platforms available.
Thanks!
The process is fairly simple - an ISV approaches the RHEV team, runs through some steps and begins development, with our assistance. I am in fact part of the team that works with ISVs, so if you have a lead, you can throw it my way directly.
This does require interest on the ISV's side, and mutual customers are in the best position to spur that interest. I have met with several backup vendors and when I asked about RHEV, they all said they were looking at it, but would like to see a stream of requests coming in from customers in order to get onboard.
I've used Acronis for RHEV very recently and must say that it looks like a patch job. The integration is a more of a way to capture licensing rather than understanding a virtual environment. The virtual machines essentially get detected as physical machines, and therefore all the cool virtual capabilities never exposed or understood by the program itself. I will be filing 3 major issues with them in the coming week or so - they are regarding parallelisation limits on backups (don't work), network bandwidth limitations (causes Agent crash), and a peculiar XFS volume issue (takes forever even on incremental).
Guru
6827 points
Hi James,
We in our environment widely use NetBackup, but not RHEV (yet).
Quote from RHEV 3.3 Technical notes:
Backup and restore API integration, BZ#922475
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization now provides an API
set for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to backup and
restore virtual machines. For backup, a snapshot of a
virtual machine's disk is created then attached to a
virtual appliance. For restore, disks are attached to
a virtual appliance, the data is restored to the disks,
then the disks are attached to a virtual machine.
In March of 2013, Red Hat produced this paper discussing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Recovery, and in chapter 6, page 31, it talks about NetBackup.
We use NetBackup in our environment. It has strengths and weaknesses.
I'd recommend making a pro-con list of the backup solutions you consider. I'm only familiar with NetBackup, however, it's worth checking out their competition before committing to a solution.
Kind Regards,
Rem
Guru
6460 points
Basically, it has to be worth a backup vendor's time to lay out the funds to engineer a solution. In the case of Symantec, the bets they're most willing to take are VMware (due to their huge virtualization market share and the fact that, people that spend money for VMware are also likely to spend the non-trivial costs for NetBackup) and Hyper-V (similar reasons).
While Symantec doesn't want to fall by the wayside in the OpenStack space, KVM support has been slow in coming. This is most likely because a lot of places using OpenStack and/or KVM have been doing so as part of an overall cost-consciousness. This kind of cost-consciousness has led to Symantec dragging their feet in that space (fear of cost-recovery related to KVM customers likely balking at the non-trivial per-TB price of NBU). Overall, given RHEV's lineage, I'd expect it to lag behind the already barely-nascent KVM support.
Community Member
32 points
It looks like SEP provides a snapshot based backup solution:
https://www.sepusa.com/getwiki/RHEV_backup
https://www.sepusa.com/news_and_events/white-papers/sep-whitepaper-red-hat-virtualization-40-rhv-backups-sep
Community Member
32 points
Acronis seams to support snaphshot based backups as well:
http://www.acronis.com/de-de/business/backup-advanced/rhev/
I'm not sure that these are necessarily "Enterprise" backup solutions, but they're what I was able to find:
Storware vProtect seems to be working okay. It looks like it's going to be around $2k for our 3-node cluster. https://storware.eu/en/storware-vprotect/
The way that it works is to take a snapshot of a VM, clone that snapshot to another VM, and then export that to the export domain. Not sure if there's a more efficient way to do that through the backup/restore API.
Longer term, I'm hoping that Bareos supports RHV. I found a FOSDEM presentation where they mentioned that they were going to start leveraging the backup/restore API. http://download.bareos.org/bareos/people/sduehr/2017-fosdem-bareos-python-plugins.pdf
● More ideas – application specific plugins – oVirt/RHEV: ● Has a Backup-Restore API, we will start soon working on using http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/storage/backup-restore-api-integration/
Active Contributor
267 points
I would think to have a successful solution that snapshots and clones VMs every night also means there better be a very robust network and storage solution to support all that IO. I've seen a similar solution with vSphere and Commvault, but I think it was happened with way too much network security which interfered with good Net Ops.
Newbie
17 points
Hello Everyone,
As a Storware CTO I can say that we working hard to be best in class on the RHEV/RHV data protection field. Today our clients can choose, whether they want to enhance existing backup vendor or they want to build a new island.
Freedom of choice: vProtect can work independent (disk or cloud based backup - S3 or OS Swift) or can take a role as a media server to
store backups in 3 enterprise-grade backup providers - IBM Spectrum Protect , Dell EMC DataDomain , Dell EMC Networker , Veritas Netbackup .
Lately, with release 2.6 (Pulsar) we have introduced file-level restore for RHV/oVirt environments. Together with a possibility to stream backup directly from the file system backup provider, now users can almost instantly access specific files in VM backups. Also RHV/oVirt environments also received tag-based auto-assignment feature to simplify the process of grouping VM's and scheduling backups.
We plan to have the Incremental Backup with Change Block Tracking (CBT) in Q3 2017.
YouTube - RHEV Backup - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKb3zG5amZE
Please do find more on below links:
vProtect guides:
http://docs.storware.eu/vProtect/vProtect
Presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/PawelMaczka/storware-vprotect-simplified-data-protection-for-virtual-environments-71536065
WhitePaper:
https://storware.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/White-Paper-vProtect_RHV.pdf
Article:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/its-multi-hypervisor-world-let-vprotect-your-vm-guard-marcin-kubacki
Hi Everyone,
Can anyone let me know, how HP Micro focus Data Protector can be integrated with RHEV environment to take backup for VMs and do file level restore of that VM?
there is a solution by red hat -- I think it's part of RHV 4.2+ https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-ansible-disaster-recovery is the upstream link
Hi, everyone I'm just using vProtect + NetBackup and Commvault backup REV Manager. And I really have to admit that vProtect is more transparent and works without any problems. The main problem is not soft for backup but API REV Manager.
We recently engaged RHEL on this along with Veeam, Rubrik, and started to talk w/Commvault . We use Dell EMC currently. Live VM Snapshot w/CBT based backups are attractive but are harder than most think to get applications backed up has more dependencies. It took some diving in the details for us to learn this. You should ask your vendor and/or RHEL on it if you need to know. The restores are great and just a mouse click and minutes away pretty much. We use VMWare but the same problems occur in RHEV/Ovirt or any other VM Host platform, VM OS, and OS Application.
In my opinion, EMC does not have good integration with REV. Storware works without a problem, I have a fully working environment REV + vProtectt + Netbackup
True EMC does not have RHEV Mgr support afaik. At the RHEL VM level it almost does not need to in these cases where Live or Cold VM backup with CBT is of interest, or even file level backups which it does. For us the file level is pretty well supported across vendors. Its the live VM snapshot w/CBT that is the gap we are looking for.
Hi There, I just find out this (below) project from the internet. There will be more since the technology behind is pretty simple and flexible to implement solutions.. https://github.com/zipurman/oVIRT_Simple_Backup
Newbie
5 points
[Disclosure: I work for Trilio]
Trilio expanded its data protection platform to natively support RHV last year. It's agentless and integrates into the RHV Manager GUI. If you're interested, you can find out more information here: https://www.trilio.io/triliovault/red-hat-virtualization/
