storsimple-configure-backup-target-using-backup-exec.md

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Configure StorSimple with Veritas Backup Exec | Microsoft Docs	Describes the StorSimple Backup Target configuration with Veritas Backup Exec.	storsimple		hkanna	matd			storsimple	na	article	na	na	12/05/2016	hkanna

Configure StorSimple with Veritas Backup Exec™

Overview

Microsoft Azure StorSimple is a hybrid cloud storage solution that addresses the complexities of exponential data growth. This solution uses an Azure storage account as an extension of the on-premises solution and automatically tiers data across on-premises storage and the cloud storage.

This article discusses StorSimple integration with Veritas Backup Exec and the best practices for integrating both the solutions. We also present recommendations on how to configure Veritas Backup Exec to best integrate with StorSimple. We defer to Veritas best practices, backup architects, and administrators on how to best configure Veritas Backup Exec to meet your backup requirements and SLAs.

This article illustrates configuration steps and key concepts but is by no means a step-by-step configuration or installation guide. The article assumes that the basic components and infrastructure are in working order and ready to support the concepts that we describe.

Why StorSimple as a backup target?

StorSimple is a great backup target for the following reasons:

• It provides standard local storage for backup applications to use without any changes to provide a fast backup destination. StorSimple is also available for quick restore of recent backups.

• Its cloud tiering is seamlessly integrated with cost-effective Microsoft Azure cloud storage.

• It automatically provides offsite storage for disaster recovery.

Target audience

The audience for this paper includes backup administrators, storage administrators, and storage architects with knowledge of storage, Windows Server 2012 R2, Ethernet, cloud services, and Veritas Backup Exec.

Supported versions

For a complete list of supported versions, go to:

• Backup Exec versions 16 and above.

• StorSimple Update 3 and above.

Key concepts

As with any other storage solution, a careful assessment of the solution’s storage performance, SLAs, rate of change, and capacity growth needs is critical to success. The main idea is that by introducing a cloud tier, your access times and throughputs to the cloud play a fundamental role in the ability of StorSimple to do its job.

StorSimple is designed to provide storage to applications that operate on a well-defined working set of data (hot data). In this model, the working set of data is stored on the local tiers, and the remaining non-working/cold/archived set of data is tiered to the cloud. This model is represented in the following figure. The nearly flat green line represents the data stored on the local tiers of the StorSimple device. The red line represents the total amount of data stored on the StorSimple solution across all the tiers. The space between the flat green line and the exponential red curve represents the total amount of data stored in the cloud.

StorSimple tiering

With this architecture in mind, you will find that StorSimple is ideally suited to operate as a backup target. StorSimple lets you:

• Perform most frequent restores from the local working set of data.

• Use the cloud for offsite disaster recovery and older data where restores are less frequent.

StorSimple benefits

StorSimple provides an on-premises solution that is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Azure, by taking advantage of seamless access to on-premises and cloud storage.

StorSimple uses automatic tiering between the on-premises device, which contains solid-state device (SSD) and serial-attached SCSI (SAS) storage, and Azure Storage. Automatic tiering keeps frequently accessed data local, on the SSD and SAS tiers, and it moves infrequently accessed data to Azure Storage.

StorSimple offers the following benefits:

• Unique deduplication and compression algorithms that use the cloud to achieve unprecedented deduplication levels

• High availability

• Geo-replication by leveraging Azure geo-replication

• Azure integration

• Data encryption in the cloud

• Improved disaster recovery and compliance

Although StorSimple presents two main deployment scenarios (primary and secondary backup target), keep in mind that it is fundamentally a plain block storage device. StorSimple does all the compression and deduplication, and it sends and retrieves data from the cloud seamlessly to both the application and the file system.

For more information about StorSimple, see StorSimple 8000 series: hybrid cloud storage solution and review the technical StorSimple 8000 series specifications.

Important

StorSimple device as backup target is only supported with StorSimple 8000 Update 3 or later.

Architecture overview

The following tables contain the device model-to-architecture initial guidance.

StorSimple capacities for local and cloud storage

Storage capacity	8100	8600
Local storage capacity	< 10 TiB*	< 20 TiB*
Cloud storage capacity	> 200 TiB*	> 500 TiB*

* Storage size assumes no deduplication or compression.

StorSimple capacities for primary and secondary backups

Backup scenario	Local storage capacity	Cloud storage capacity
Primary backup	Recent backups stored on local storage for fast recovery (RPO)	Backup history (RPO) fits in cloud capacity
Secondary backup	Secondary copy of backup data can be stored in cloud capacity

StorSimple as a primary backup target

In this scenario, the StorSimple volumes are presented to the backup application as the sole repository for backups. The following figure illustrates the solution architecture where all the backups use StorSimple tiered volumes for both backups and restores.

Primary target backup logical steps

1. Backup server contacts the target backup agent and backup agent transmits data to backup server.

2. Backup server writes data to StorSimple tiered volumes.

3. Backup server updates catalog database and completes the backup job.

4. Snapshot script triggers the StorSimple cloud snapshot management (start-delete).

5. Based on a retention policy, the backup server deletes the expired backups.

Primary target restore logical steps

1. Backup server starts restoring the appropriate data from the storage repository.

2. Backup agent receives the data from Backup server.

3. Backup server completes the restore job.

StorSimple as a secondary backup target

In this scenario, the StorSimple volumes are primarily used for mostly long-term retention or archiving.

The following figure illustrates the architecture where the initial backups and restores target a high-performance volume. These backups are copied and archived to a StorSimple tiered volume at a given schedule.

It is important to size your high-performance volume with ample space and performance to handle the retention policy capacity and performance requirements.

Secondary target backup logical steps

1. Backup server contacts the target backup agent and backup agent transmits data to backup server.

2. Backup server writes data to high-performance storage.

3. Backup server updates catalog database and completes the backup job.

4. Based on a retention policy the backup server copies backups to StorSimple.

5. Snapshot script triggers StorSimple cloud snapshot management (start-delete).

6. Based on a retention policy, the backup server deletes the expired backups.

Secondary target restore logical steps

1. Backup server starts restoring the appropriate data from the storage repository.

2. Backup agent receives the data from backup server.

3. Backup server completes the restore job.

Deploy the solution

The deployment of this solution consists of three steps: preparing the network infrastructure, deploying your StorSimple device as a backup target, and finally deploying the Veritas Backup Exec. Each of these steps is discussed in detail in the following sections.

Configure the network

StorSimple as an integrated solution with the Azure cloud requires an active and working connection to the Azure cloud. This connection is used for operations such as cloud snapshots, management, metadata transfer, and to tier older, less accessed data to the Azure cloud storage.

For the solution to perform optimally, we recommend that you adhere to the following networking best practices:

• The link that connects the StorSimple tiering to Azure must meet your bandwidth requirements by applying the proper the Quality of Service (QoS) to your infrastructure switches to match your RPO/RTO SLAs.

• The maximum Azure Blob Storage access latencies should be in the 80 ms range.

Deploy StorSimple

For a step-by-step StorSimple deployment guidance, go to Deploy your on-premises StorSimple device.

Deploy Veritas Backup Exec

For Veritas Backup Exec installation best practices, go to Best practices for Backup Exec installation.

Configure the solution

In this section, we demonstrate some configuration examples. The following examples/recommendations illustrate the most basic and fundamental implementation. This implementation may not apply directly to your specific backup requirements.

Configure StorSimple

StorSimple deployment tasks	Additional comments
Deploy your on-premises StorSimple device.	Supported version: Update 3 and above.
Enable backup target mode.	Use the following commands to enable/disable and get status. For more information, go to connect remotely to a StorSimple. Enable backup mode:Set-HCSBackupApplianceMode -enable Disable backup mode:Set-HCSBackupApplianceMode -disable Current state of backup mode settingsGet-HCSBackupApplianceMode
Create a common volume container for your volume that stores the backup data. All data in a volume container is de-duplicated.	StorSimple volume containers define deduplication domains.
Creating StorSimple volumes	Create volumes with sizes as close to the anticipated usage as possible as volume size affects cloud snapshot duration time. For more information on how to size a volume, go to Retention policies. Use StorSimple tiered volumes and check Use this volume for less frequently accessed archival data. Locally pinned volumes only are not supported.
Create a unique StorSimple backup policy for all the backup target volumes.	A StorSimple backup policy defines the volume consistency group.
Disable the schedule as the snapshots.	Snapshots are triggered as a post-processing operation.

Configure host backup server storage

Ensure that the host backup server storage is configured as per the following guidelines.

• Spanned volumes (created by Windows Disk manager) are not supported.
• Format your volumes using NTFS with 64 KB allocation size.
• Map the StorSimple volumes directly to the “Veeam” server.
  • Use iSCSI in case of physical servers.
  • Use pass-through disks for virtual servers.

Best practices for StorSimple and Veritas Backup Exec

Configure your solution as per the following guidelines.

Operating system

• Disable Windows Server encryption and deduplication for the NTFS file system.

• Disable Windows Server defragmentation on the StorSimple volumes.

• Disable Windows Server indexing on the StorSimple volumes.

• Perform an antivirus scan at the source host (not against the StorSimple volumes).

• Disable the default Windows Server maintenance in task manager.

  • Disable Maintenance configurator in Windows Task Scheduler.

    Or

  • Download: PSEXEC – Microsoft Sysinternals

    • After downloading PSEXEC, run Windows PowerShell as an administrator, and type:

      `psexec \\%computername% -s schtasks /change /tn “MicrosoftWindowsTaskSchedulerMaintenance Configurator" /disable`
      

StorSimple

• Ensure the StorSimple device is updated to Update 3 or later.

• Isolate iSCSI and cloud traffic. Use dedicated iSCSI connections for traffic between StorSimple and backup server.

• Ensure StorSimple device is a dedicated backup target. Mixed workloads are not supported as these impact your RTO/RPO.

Veritas Backup Exec

• Veritas Backup Exec must be installed on a local drive of the server and not on a StorSimple volume.

• Set the Veritas Backup Exec Storage concurrent write operations to the maximum allowed.

  • Veritas Backup Exec Storage block and buffer size should be set at 512 KB.

  • Veritas Backup Exec Storage buffered read and write should be enabled.

• Veritas Backup Exec full and incremental backups are supported while synthetic and differential backups are not recommended.

• Backup data files should only contain data for a specific job. For example, no media appends across different jobs are allowed.

• Disable job verification. If necessary, verification should be scheduled after the latest backup job. It is important to understand that this job affects your backup window.

• In the Storage > Your disk > Details > Properties, disable Pre-allocate disk space.

Refer to the Veritas Backup Exec documentation for the latest Veritas Backup Exec settings and best practices on how to implement these requirements by visiting www.veritas.com.

Retention policies

One of the most used backup retention policies is the Grandfather, Father, and Son (GFS). In this policy, an incremental backup is performed daily. The full backups are done weekly and monthly. This policy results in 6 StorSimple tiered volumes.

• One volume contains the weekly, monthly, and yearly full backups.

• The other 5 volumes store daily incremental backups.

In the following example, we are a GFS rotation. The example assumes the following:

• Non-deduped or compressed data is used.

• Full backups are 1 TiB each.

• Daily incremental backups are 500 GiB each.

• 4 weekly backups kept for a month.

• 12 monthly backups kept for a year.

• 1 yearly backup kept for 10 years.

Based on the preceeding assumptions, create a 26 TiB StorSimple tiered volume for the monthly and yearly full backups. Create a 5 TiB StorSimple tiered volume for each of the incremental daily backups.

Backup type retention	Size TiB	GFS multiplier*	Total capacity TiB
Weekly full	1	4	4
Daily incremental	0.5	20 (cycles equal number of weeks per month)	12 (2 for additional quota)
Monthly full	1	12	12
Yearly full	1	10	10
GFS requirement			38
Additional quota	4		42 total GFS requirement

*The GFS multiplier is the number of copies you need to protect and keep to meet your backup policies.

Configure Veritas Backup Exec storage

1. In Veritas Backup Exec management console, select Storage > Configure Storage > Disk-Based Storage. Click Next>.

   

2. Click Disk Storage and then proceed to the next page.

   

3. Enter a representative name, for example, Saturday Full and an accompanying description. Proceed to the next page.

   

4. Select the appropriate disk and click Next >. For instance, we selected D:.

   

5. Increment the number of write operations to 16 and click Next >.

   

6. review the settings and click Finish.

   

7. At the end of each assignment, change the storage device settings to match the recommended settings in the best practices list.

   

8. Repeat all the preceding steps until you are finished assigning your StorSimple volumes to Veritas Backup Exec.

StorSimple as a primary backup target

Note

Be aware that if you need to restore data from a backup that has been tiered to the cloud, the restore occurs at cloud speeds.

In the following figure, we illustrate mapping of a typical volume to a backup job. In this case, all the weekly backups map to Saturday full disk, and the incremental backups map to Monday-Friday incremental disks. All the backups and restores happen from a StorSimple tiered volume.

StorSimple as a primary backup target Grandfather, Father, and Son (GFS) schedule example

GFS Rotation Schedule for 4 weeks, Monthly and Yearly
Frequency/Backup type	Full	Incremental (day 1 - 5)
Weekly (week 1 - 4)	Saturday	Monday - Friday
Monthly	Saturday
Yearly	Saturday

Assigning StorSimple volumes to a Veritas Backup Exec backup job.

The following sequence assumes that Backup Exec and the target host are configured in accordance with the Backup Exec agent guidelines.

1. In the Veritas Backup Exec management console, go to Host > Backup > Backup to Disk >.

   

2. In the Backup Definition Properties window, select Edit (under Backup).

   

3. Configure your full and incremental backups so that they meet your RPO/RTO requirements and conform to the Veritas best practices.

4. On the Backup Options window, select Storage.

   

5. Assign corresponding StorSimple volumes to your backup schedule.

   [!NOTE] Compression and Encryption type are set to None.

6. Under Verify, select the Do not verify data for this job as this may affect StorSimple tiering.

   [!NOTE] Defragmentation, indexing, and background verification negatively affect the StorSimple tiering.

   

7. After you have configured the rest of your backup options to meet your requirements, select OK to finish.

StorSimple as a secondary backup target

Note

Be aware that if you need to restore data from a backup that has been tiered to the cloud, the restore occurs at cloud speeds.

In this model, you must have a storage media (other than StorSimple) to serve as a temporary cache. For example, you could use a RAID volume to accommodate space, I/O, and bandwidth. We recommend using RAID 5, 50, and 10.

In the following figure, we illustrate typical short-term retention local (to the server) volumes and long-term retention archive volumes. In this case, all the backups run on the local (to the server) RAID volume. These backups are periodically duplicated and archived to an archive volume. It is important to size your local (to the server) RAID volume to handle the short-term retention capacity and performance requirements.

StorSimple as a secondary backup target GFS example

The following table illustrates how the backups should be configured to run on the local and StorSimple disks and includes the individual and the total capacity requirements.

Backup configuration and capacity requirements

Backup type and retention	Configured storage	Size (TiB)	GFS multiplier	Total capacity (TiB)
Week 1 (full and incremental)	Local disk (short term)	1	1	1
StorSimple week 2-4	StorSimple disk (long term)	1	4	4
Monthly full	StorSimple disk (long term)	1	12	12
Yearly full	StorSimple disk (long term)	1	1	1
GFS volumes size requirement				18*

* the total capacity includes 17 TiB of StorSimple disks and 1 TiB of local RAID volume.

GFS example schedule

GFS rotation weekly, monthly, and yearly schedule
Frequency	Full	Incremental day 1	Incremental day 2	Incremental day 3	Incremental day 4	Incremental day 5
Week 1	Local RAID volume	Local RAID volume	Local RAID volume	Local RAID volume	Local RAID volume	Local RAID volume
Week 2	StorSimple week 2-4
Week 3	StorSimple week 2-4
Week 4	StorSimple week 2-4
Monthly	StorSimple monthly
Yearly	StorSimple yearly

Assign StorSimple volumes to Backup Exec archive/deduplication job

1. Once the initial backup job is configured to use the RAID volume as the primary backup target, go to Veritas Backup Exec management console. Select the job that you want to archive to a StorSimple volume, right-click, and select Backup Definition Properties. Click Edit.

   

2. Select Add Stage and from the dropdown list, select Duplicate to Disk. Click Edit.

   

3. In the Duplicate Options, select the appropriate Source and the Schedule.

   

4. From the Storage dropdown list, select the StorSimple volume where you want the archive job to store the data. In this case, the source is set to Full and target is set to the StorSimple full archive volume.

   

5. Go to Verify and select Do not verify data for this job.

   

6. Click OK.

   

7. In the Backup column, add a new stage. Choose the source as incremental and the target as StorSimple volume where the incremental backup job is archived. Repeat the preceding steps.

StorSimple cloud snapshots

StorSimple cloud snapshots protect the data that resides in StorSimple device. This is equivalent to shipping tapes to an offsite facility and if using Azure geo-redundant storage (GRS), as shipping tapes to multiple sites. If a device restore was needed in a disaster, you could bring another StorSimple device online and do a failover. Following the failover, you would be able to access the data (at cloud speeds) from the most recent cloud snapshot.

The following section illustrates how to create a short script to trigger and delete StorSimple cloud snapshots during backup post-processing.

Note

Snapshots that are manually or programmatically created do not follow the StorSimple snapshot expiration policy. These must be manually or programmatically deleted.

Start and delete cloud snapshots with a script

Note

Carefully assess the compliance and data retention repercussions before you delete a StorSimple snapshot. For more information on how to run a post-backup script, refer to Veritas Backup Exec documentation.

Backup lifecycle

Requirements:

• The server that runs the script must have access to Azure cloud.

• The user account must have the necessary permissions.

• A StorSimple backup policy with the associated StorSimple volumes configured but not enabled.

• StorSimple resource name, registration key, device name, and backup policy ID.

Steps:

1. Install Azure PowerShell.

2. Download and import publish Settings and subscription information.

3. In the Azure classic portal, get the resource name and registration key for your StorSimple Manager service.

4. On the server that runs the script, run Windows PowerShell as Administrator. Type:

   • Get-AzureStorSimpleDeviceBackupPolicy –DeviceName <device name>

   Make a note of the backup policy ID.

5. In Notepad, create a new Windows PowerShell Script and save it in the same location where you saved the Azure publish settings. For example, C:\\CloudSnapshot\\StorSimpleCloudSnapshot.ps1.

   Copy and paste the following code snippet:

   Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "c:\\CloudSnapshot Snapshot\\myAzureSettings.publishsettings"
   Disable-AzureDataCollection
   $ApplianceName = <myStorSimpleApplianceName>
   $RetentionInDays = 20
   $RetentionInDays = -$RetentionInDays
   $Today = Get-Date
   $ExpirationDate = $Today.AddDays($RetentionInDays)
   Select-AzureStorSimpleResource -ResourceName "myResource" –RegistrationKey
   Start-AzureStorSimpleDeviceBackupJob –DeviceName $ApplianceName -BackupType CloudSnapshot -BackupPolicyId <BackupId> -Verbose
   $CompletedSnapshots =@()
   $CompletedSnapshots = Get-AzureStorSimpleDeviceBackup -DeviceName $ApplianceName
   Write-Host "The Expiration date is " $ExpirationDate
   Write-Host
   
   ForEach ($SnapShot in $CompletedSnapshots)
   {
   $SnapshotStartTimeStamp = $Snapshot.CreatedOn
   if ($SnapshotStartTimeStamp -lt $ExpirationDate)
   
       {
       $SnapShotInstanceID = $SnapShot.InstanceId
       Write-Host "This snapshotdate was created on " $SnapshotStartTimeStamp.Date.ToShortDateString()
       Write-Host "Instance ID " $SnapShotInstanceID
       Write-Host "This snpashotdate is older and needs to be deleted"
       Write-host "\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#\#"
       Remove-AzureStorSimpleDeviceBackup -DeviceName $ApplianceName -BackupId $SnapShotInstanceID -Force -Verbose
       }
   }   

6. Add the script to your backup job in Veritas Backup Exec, by editing your Veritas Backup Exec job options pre-post commands.

   

Note

We recommend that you run your StorSimple cloud snapshot backup policy at the end of your daily backup job as a post process script. For more information on how to back up and restore your backup application environment to meet your RPO/RTO, consult your backup architect.

StorSimple as a restore source

Restores from a StorSimple work similar to restores from any block storage device. When restoring data that is tiered to the cloud, restores occur at cloud speeds. For local data, restores occur at local disk speed of the device. For information on how to perform a restore, refer to Veritas Backup Exec documentation, and conform to Veritas Backup Exec restore best practices.

StorSimple failover and disaster recovery

Note

For backup target scenarios, StorSimple Cloud Appliance is not supported as a restore target.

A disaster could occur due to various factors. The following table lists common disaster recovery (DR) scenarios.

Scenario	Impact	How to recover	Notes
StorSimple device failure.	Backup and restore operations are interrupted.	Replace the failed device and perform StorSimple failover and disaster recovery.	If a restore is performed immediately after the device recovery, the full working sets are being retrieved from the cloud to the new device. As a result, all operations are at cloud speeds. Additionally, the index and catalog rescanning could cause all the backup sets to be scanned and pulled from cloud tier to the local tier of the device. This makes it further time-intensive.
Veritas Backup Exec Server failure.	Backup and restore operations are interrupted.	Rebuild the backup server and perform database restore as detailed in How to do a manual Backup and Restore of Backup Exec (BEDB) database.	The Veritas Backup Exec server needs to be rebuilt or restored at the DR site. The database needs to be restored to the most recent point. If the restored Veritas Backup Exec database is not in sync with your latest backup jobs, indexing and cataloging is required. This index and catalog rescanning could cause all backup sets to be scanned and pulled from cloud tier to local device tier. This makes it further time-intensive.
Site failure that results in the loss of both Backup server and StorSimple.	Backup and restore operations are interrupted.	Restore StorSimple first and then Veritas Backup Exec.	Restore StorSimple first and then Veritas Backup Exec. If there is a need to perform a restore after device recovery, the full data working sets are retrieved from the cloud to the new device. As a result, all operations are at cloud speed rate.

References

The following documents have been referenced in this article:

• StorSimple MPIO setup

• Storage scenarios: Thin provisioning

• Using GPT drives

• Enable and configure shadow copies for shared folders

Next steps

Learn more:

• About how to Restore from a backupset.
• About how to perform Device failover and disaster recovery.