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Question

should media agents get backed up

  • 12 March 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 34 views
T
Rank
Userlevel 2
Badge +6

Hello CV Community

 

We have four virtual Media Agents which work in a Windows Hyper-V environment.  Its come to our attention recently that they are failing a VM level backup.  This is due to them having Virtual Fibre channels which are mapped directly to storage.  I cant see anyway of filtering out vFC’s and as a result the backup is failing.  My main questions are

 

  1.  Is it good practice to backup the Media Agents on a weekly basis?
  2. If it is, how do I exclude the fibre channels?  The issue seems to be it cannot create a snapshot due to the integration of Virtual Fibre Channels.

May thanks

Tony Q

3 replies

J
Rank

Hi,

Firstly… securing the Media Agents is not a bad idea.

Regarding the setup and the backups…

As far as I understand, the backup should be doable. What I expect to see in your VM configuration is something similar to the below:

The mapping can be pass-htru or vFC.

I believe the backup fails with the erro recorded in vsbkp.log on HV host:

VSBkpWorker::UnmountVM() - Errors found during backup. Error String [Pass-through disks are not supported]

To get this all working:

  • get the SCSI detail of the disks from HV host:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> get-vm test2019 | get-vmharddiskdrive

VMName   ControllerType ControllerNumber ControllerLocation DiskNumber Path
------   -------------- ---------------- ------------------ ---------- ----
test2019 SCSI           0                0                             C:\VMs\Disks\test2019.vhdx
test2019 SCSI           0                1                  1          Disk 1 40.00 GB Bus 0 Lun 223 Target 0

  • create a VM disk filter under subclient:

 

After taking such steps, the backup should succeed.

Damian Andre
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Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Great info for filtering vFC.

I’m going to disagree slightly on protecting Media Agents, however. You can do it, but I would not consider it a ‘best practice’. Media Agents are designed to be dispensable. DDBs and Index are protected automatically, and configuration is stored in the CommServe database.

And in the worst case scenario, how will you restore your MA without an MA? :)

If you are able to recover it, there is a high chance everything will be out of sync - A DDB reconstruct will still happen, as well as index restore and reconstructions.

If you architect it correctly, you may be able to save a little bit of time - but at that point there might be benefits in starting fresh or taking the opportunity to re-platform to a newer OS etc.

T
Rank
Userlevel 2
Badge +6

Hi Damien & Jacek

 

Thanks very much both for your replies on this.  We spoke with a consultancy we deal with and they advised NOT to backup MA’s like normal servers/nodes as its not best practice.  There is a system created DDB backup job for each media agent see below.

 

This job runs on each media agent backing up I believe the DDB and the Index Cache.  If a Media agent was to crash/break, we would rebuild it from scratch and restore the database on top.  

Thanks again for helping me on this and giving your time to answer my query.

 

Thanks

TonyQ

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