Hello everyone,
Recently I read an article from Dell powersolutions magazine about how off-host backups can be enabled with Equallogic ASM and Veritas Netbackup but I not sure with the know-how, any help or step by step guide will be appreciated.
It is not clear for me if Auto-Snap Manager has to be also installed in the Veritas Netbackup Media server? The scheduled backups have to be created within Netbackup job scheduler and also in Equallogic Auto-Snap Manager?
Thanks,
Guillermo

I'm not aware of any step-by-step manuals available. That would typically come from the vendor. I.e There's a step-by-step PDF for Backup Exec using the ADBO module with the EQL array.

You would need ASM/ME installed on the veritas Netbackup Media server, along with the MS iSCSI initiator and it would need to be able to reach the SAN subnet. Also, due to a MS change in VSS, you can't backup W2K3 from a W2K8 backup server this way. (nor vice-versa) So host and backup server have to be same OS.

You would schedule the backups ONLY with NB. Auto snapshot manager itself doesn't get called directly.

The "basic" steps, which are the same for all such operations as this are:

1.) Backup Program (BP) calls to agent running on the host with data.
2.) Agent selects disk to be backed up and calls MS Volume Shadow Service(VSS) to create a consistent snapshot.
3.) VSS reads the vendor ID on the volume. With the HIT kit installed the HW provider that's included will allow VSS to connect to the array and create a HW snapshot.
4.) VSS returns the snapshot name and IP address via XML to the agent.
5.) The agent passes that back to the Backup Program. (BP) (Which is why the OS versions have to be the same)
6.) The BP then will create an iSCSI session to the snapshot just created using the XML info. It will connect using the MS iscsi cli program.
7.) Now the snapshot will appear as a local disk to the BP.
8.) When the backup finishes it will logout and vss will be told to delete the snapshot on the array.

So all the "hard" work is done by the backup program.

Hope this helps.

-don

Thanks for your help.