Method to backup iSCSI-Targets on DSS v6

Hi,

we bought an hardware apliance with dss v6 and I configured various iSCSI targets and nas shares. Now I set up a Windows server with Backupexec 11d, which we allready owned. This server has Raid6 with 16TB disk space. I would like to implement an efficient way to backup dss v6 iSCSI targets and nas shares on our backupserver. Within dss menu I have seen the possibility to setup replication for nas shares, but what about iSCSI? Is this replication writing changes to the source immidiatly to the target? I am thankfull for some hints.

Regards, Heinzelrumpel

No one has a clue how to backup iSCSI :confused:

Quote:

Originally Posted by heinzelrumpel

Hi,

we bought an hardware apliance with dss v6 and I configured various iSCSI targets and nas shares. Now I set up a Windows server with Backupexec 11d, which we allready owned. This server has Raid6 with 16TB disk space. I would like to implement an efficient way to backup dss v6 iSCSI targets and nas shares on our backupserver. Within dss menu I have seen the possibility to setup replication for nas shares, but what about iSCSI? Is this replication writing changes to the source immidiatly to the target? I am thankfull for some hints.

Regards, Heinzelrumpel

Hi Heinzelrumpel,

if none of the DSS built-in backup clients can connect to your backup server, you'll have to backup like with any other system, via some "client system" outside of DSS :mad: .

For NAS you could set up a mega share (giving you access to all NAS data, at least per volume), mount this from some client system and do yourfile-based backups from there.

(The NAS replication you refer to is DSS-to-DSS only.)

With iSCSI it's a lot more difficult: If you can't shut down your iSCSI initiators for backup (very unlikely!), you'll have to take into account that the iSCSI share is simply a block device - and the initiator will most likely be caching file system changes and not have them flushed to the "device" immediately. Therefore, to be on the safer side, you ought to consider running backup clients on the iSCSI initiators and then back up file-based from there.

If you dare to take the risk of inconsistent file systems, you might again use some dedicated backup client that attaches the device via iSCSI (but read-only, since concurrent to the production initiator!), you'd then be able to backup the whole device (ie an image). But as the production iSCSI initiator will most likely change the disk's content while you're backing it up, you ought to back up a *snapshot*. If I recall correctly, the ssh CLI of DSSv6 might be of help creating the snapshot and (after the backup) free it from within a backup script running on your dedicated backup client.

Proper backups ain't easy ;)

With regards,
jmo