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Looking for help with a new implementation


Greg Mitchell

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I have a very small VMWare Essentials environment.
 
2 Dell R340 Hosts, 1 socket each
Backing up 3 Windows Server VMs running in VMWare esxi 7 u3
1 Linux vm lab machine
~3Tb footprint
2 Synology 4bay NAS RackStation RS820RP+, 18Tb storage each, 36Tb total storage
 
I recently had a real-life disaster scenario. One of my older Synology NAS Devices lost two drives out of 4 in less than 24 hours. A real-life lesson that a RAID Array (or any redundant disk storage) is not a backup. It is a slightly more reliable place to store data that needs to be backed up properly.
 
Also, I had not been backing up properly.
 
One of the Windows VMs services a ~2Tb vhd, mostly Video, Pictures, and Office Documents. This drive is trouble to back up. It averages about 3gb overall block change each day, an average of < 50Mb a day in new bits. Backing this up on the block-level using the VMWare backend takes forever. By the time you compress it, dedup, and write it, the Full backup took 6-8 hours (again, not using the Nokivo tools). The daily incrementals only took 6 minutes. Looking at the full backups, I thought "that is slow, but not horrible."
 
Restoring that file server took more than five full days, processing on brand new hardware, at ~30mb/s. During that time we were able to function as a company, but the pain was tremendous. I could restore individual files/folders upon request, but I could not launch that server until all of the blocks were in place. Needless to say, I am new to Nakivo because I am looking for a better tool.  I would like to avoid disasters in the future. I have only just installed Nakivo Backup on my Synology devices
 
I think it makes sense to create a Primary backup job that covers my 3 servers. I would eliminate that one vhd from the primary backup job and back those blocks up at the file level from the Windows OS to a secondary target. I could then replicate the vhd to the other host for a live backup, and process a compressed, deduped daily that gets tucked away, safe from ransomware.
 
Does that make sense, or am I missing something? 
 
Additional note: To save money initially and because I was planning to use the free version of ESXi, I only bought one core per host. That makes fitting all of my active VMs on one host pretty hairy, and that is why I don't run a live replica of all 3 servers. If anyone would like to cure my ignorance, I am all ears.
 
 
 
Thank you for your time.
 
Greg
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17 hours ago, Greg Mitchell said:
I have a very small VMWare Essentials environment.
 
2 Dell R340 Hosts, 1 socket each
Backing up 3 Windows Server VMs running in VMWare esxi 7 u3
1 Linux vm lab machine
~3Tb footprint
2 Synology 4bay NAS RackStation RS820RP+, 18Tb storage each, 36Tb total storage
 
I recently had a real-life disaster scenario. One of my older Synology NAS Devices lost two drives out of 4 in less than 24 hours. A real-life lesson that a RAID Array (or any redundant disk storage) is not a backup. It is a slightly more reliable place to store data that needs to be backed up properly.
 
Also, I had not been backing up properly.
 
One of the Windows VMs services a ~2Tb vhd, mostly Video, Pictures, and Office Documents. This drive is trouble to back up. It averages about 3gb overall block change each day, an average of < 50Mb a day in new bits. Backing this up on the block-level using the VMWare backend takes forever. By the time you compress it, dedup, and write it, the Full backup took 6-8 hours (again, not using the Nokivo tools). The daily incrementals only took 6 minutes. Looking at the full backups, I thought "that is slow, but not horrible."
 
Restoring that file server took more than five full days, processing on brand new hardware, at ~30mb/s. During that time we were able to function as a company, but the pain was tremendous. I could restore individual files/folders upon request, but I could not launch that server until all of the blocks were in place. Needless to say, I am new to Nakivo because I am looking for a better tool.  I would like to avoid disasters in the future. I have only just installed Nakivo Backup on my Synology devices
 
I think it makes sense to create a Primary backup job that covers my 3 servers. I would eliminate that one vhd from the primary backup job and back those blocks up at the file level from the Windows OS to a secondary target. I could then replicate the vhd to the other host for a live backup, and process a compressed, deduped daily that gets tucked away, safe from ransomware.
 
Does that make sense, or am I missing something? 
 
Additional note: To save money initially and because I was planning to use the free version of ESXi, I only bought one core per host. That makes fitting all of my active VMs on one host pretty hairy, and that is why I don't run a live replica of all 3 servers. If anyone would like to cure my ignorance, I am all ears.
 
 
 
Thank you for your time.
 
Greg

Hello, Greg Mitchell, it looks like you need to read more about replication from backup here: https://helpcenter.nakivo.com/User-Guide/Content/Replication/Creating-VMware-Replication-Jobs/Replication-Job-Wizard-for-VMware-Source.htm#Backup

Should you need any further information, please do not hesitate to contact us. Best regards

We look forward to hearing from you. 

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Hello All,

 

I agree that I have a level of ignorance that makes getting our backup set up properly the first time very unlikely. I have reviewed the link you provided, and while there is a lot of information there about the replication job function, there is little there about the specific parameters around which one would make a decision about which backup function to use, the relative impact of different options on the hardware side, or balancing backup/restore options to balance load on the hardware with the amount of time required to restore in the event of some kind of failure.

Support has offered me a video conference call to discuss our needs and current implementation. I will post the results of that meeting here in case it would be of use to future readers.

For the record, I have been impressed so far with both the functionality of the Nakivo software, and the responsiveness and professionalism of the people I have interacted with. Thank you for your time.

 

Greg

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4 hours ago, Greg Mitchell said:

Support has offered me a video conference call to discuss our needs and current implementation. I will post the results of that meeting here in case it would be of use to future readers.

For the record, I have been impressed so far with both the functionality of the Nakivo software, and the responsiveness and professionalism of the people I have interacted with. Thank you for your time.

Greg

Thank you for your post, Greg. We will add more information according to your request to our HelpCenter, please give us more details after the video-conference with our Support Team. Feel free to let the Nakivo Forum Community know if there is anything else we can assist you with.

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Greetings,

 

In lieu of an explanation, I am posting, in part, my email to my Sales Agent at Nakivo, Thomas Semerich.
.

"Hi Thomas,

 
I spent most of an hour with Support earlier today, and I must say, it was an entirely positive experience.
 
I recently recovered from a serious device failure on our office network using a 'competing' tool. I set up the schema, but their technicians finished implementation and they signed off on their side of our DR plan. That was important because I was in a project with them that included purchasing DR support ahead of time. Less than 60 days in their care, two out of four drives in a critical erray dropped and I lost ~9Tb of shared storage. Mostly my fault, not theirs. I took responsibility for this network a year ago and had not checked on the age of those drives. It turns out they had been operational for 2+ years. I got unlucky and 2 failed within 24 hours. On that Datastore was a 3Tb VHD. Thankfully the rest of my data survived, but I was stuck with a backup of that partition that was 36 hours old. It took 134 hours, 5 full days, to stand up that Windows server because the data partition took that long to build. Thankfully that VM was only serving as a file server at the time, but I was building it out as our primary CAD SQL server. Our Vault. If this had happened exactly the same way a month later, our Company would have been without all of our Engineering horsepower for a week. That would do serious harm to our Company, and would almost certainly result in my being fired.
 
Within 15 minutes, the tech I was working with understood the story I outlined above. He then verbally simulated the event, and in real-time showed me three alternatives available through the Nakivo platform that would have solved my issue. In one case, he used "Universal Object recovery" to get my data back and shareable in less than 46 seconds. He was phenomenal at his job, and I wish I could call him out by name. Unfortunately I didn't write it down and it does not appear in my email record with support, as far as I can tell.
 
Having your platform available on Synology's OS is brilliant. The person who made that decision should be on a beach somewhere.
 
Giving me a way to save some face with my team without downloading, installing, or paying for anything up front, without even rebooting one of my devices, is priceless. I will be writing up my recent experience in the coming days and will name Nakivo's concept as the silver lining in an otherwise dismal story.
 
While we might never be your most profitable client, I will volunteer to be a cheerleader for your tech team, and your business model.
 
I will be in touch in a few weeks to establish which license package to go with..."
 
 
 
I am continuing my evaluation of Nakivo's product, but I have nothing but positive input to go by so far.
 
 
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11 hours ago, Greg Mitchell said:

Greetings,

 

In lieu of an explanation, I am posting, in part, my email to my Sales Agent at Nakivo, Thomas Semerich.
.

"Hi Thomas,

 
I spent most of an hour with Support earlier today, and I must say, it was an entirely positive experience.
 
I recently recovered from a serious device failure on our office network using a 'competing' tool. I set up the schema, but their technicians finished implementation and they signed off on their side of our DR plan. That was important because I was in a project with them that included purchasing DR support ahead of time. Less than 60 days in their care, two out of four drives in a critical erray dropped and I lost ~9Tb of shared storage. Mostly my fault, not theirs. I took responsibility for this network a year ago and had not checked on the age of those drives. It turns out they had been operational for 2+ years. I got unlucky and 2 failed within 24 hours. On that Datastore was a 3Tb VHD. Thankfully the rest of my data survived, but I was stuck with a backup of that partition that was 36 hours old. It took 134 hours, 5 full days, to stand up that Windows server because the data partition took that long to build. Thankfully that VM was only serving as a file server at the time, but I was building it out as our primary CAD SQL server. Our Vault. If this had happened exactly the same way a month later, our Company would have been without all of our Engineering horsepower for a week. That would do serious harm to our Company, and would almost certainly result in my being fired.
 
Within 15 minutes, the tech I was working with understood the story I outlined above. He then verbally simulated the event, and in real-time showed me three alternatives available through the Nakivo platform that would have solved my issue. In one case, he used "Universal Object recovery" to get my data back and shareable in less than 46 seconds. He was phenomenal at his job, and I wish I could call him out by name. Unfortunately I didn't write it down and it does not appear in my email record with support, as far as I can tell.
 
Having your platform available on Synology's OS is brilliant. The person who made that decision should be on a beach somewhere.
 
Giving me a way to save some face with my team without downloading, installing, or paying for anything up front, without even rebooting one of my devices, is priceless. I will be writing up my recent experience in the coming days and will name Nakivo's concept as the silver lining in an otherwise dismal story.
 
While we might never be your most profitable client, I will volunteer to be a cheerleader for your tech team, and your business model.
 
I will be in touch in a few weeks to establish which license package to go with..."
 
 
 
I am continuing my evaluation of Nakivo's product, but I have nothing but positive input to go by so far.
 
 

Hello, Greg Mitchell, thank you for a great feedback. I will send it to our team. We are honored to have clients like you. Please let us know if we can help in the future.

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