Nutanix Disaster Recovery

I'm looking into backing up our Nutanix Acropolis cluster to either Azure or AWS. What I'm curious about are the actual costs once you factor in not just their basic storage rate, but Puts and data writes and everything that happens during a backup and restore (rare as those would be). We have around 5 TB total with all our VMs, with the daily snapshots averaging around 40GB in changed data. We would want to retain maybe a month's worth of backups with dailies and weeklies. Is this enough data to do a decent estimate, or is it one of those 'Try and see' scenarios? I'd be interested in anybody else that's utilizaing it as a remote backup site and what kinds of costs they're seeing. Thanks! Clint

Is anyone utilizing Unitrends as a backup solution? I was looking at their appliance offering with cloud offloading since they do not charge for recovery. I also have a 3 node Nutanix block running VMWare 6, but still have a few physical servers that will remain physical for a little while longer. Thanks for any feedback.

As a pre-step to a planned failover, I want to take a snapshot of each of my Metro PD's (4 total). Together, they are over 5 TB in used storage. Since they're all in the same Storage Pool I plan on doing one at a time so as to not compound the i/o load - does this make sense? Also, can anyone provide a *rough* estimate of how long a PD snapshot should take to complete? Thanks!

As all Nutanix Acropolis users know Veeam Backup and Restore (VBR) does not yet support Acropolis (AHV). I had migrated from Vmware so I lost the ability to make VM backups. I found out about Veeam Endpoint Backup Free (VEBF) so decided to try it. The Free version does not work with the Veeam Backup and Restore Free version (I tried) so I had to build my own repository accessed by a network share. I first built a repository using an old Dell 2950 server with six sata slots. I picked up some refurbished 2TB enterprise drives (the largest the 2950 would take) for $50 each from Amazon. I installed Windows 2008 R2 on an SSD for the boot drive. Even though the server is quite old the dual Xeon processors were still pretty fast and the SSD didn't hurt. I installed VEB on one of my Win 10 VMs on my Nutanix with AHV. I mapped a drive letter to the repository. I created the Veeam boot ISO and put it on the same repository network share where the backups would go. I added an extra drivers fold

Hi everyone, considering AHV hypervisor, which are the possible options to backup the virtual machines? As far as I know, the only certified backup software is commvault... but I was wondering if AHV/prism can do vm-level backup and which are the features (guest/application consistency, possibility to file level restore ecc....) and differences compared to Commvault. Thank you

One of the greatly anticipated features of the AOS 5.0 has been the Nutanix Metro Witness functionality. There have been numerous blogs on this feature, but joshodgers blog (published at http://www.joshodgers.com/2016/06/15/whats-next-2016-metro-availability-witness/ )goes through the feature in great detail with different failure scenarios. A must read if you are using Nutanix Metro Availability today or planning to do so with AOS 5.0. Another must read is the Metro Availability Best Practices Guide (from mmcghee). From Jon Witness download is here: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/static/supportTools Witness documentation is here: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v50:sto-metro-availa...

Hello All, We recently deployed ESXi Nutanix Clusters in 2 locations, site "A", and site "B". We have setup a Nutanix Protection Domain, and are replicating VM's from site "B" to "A". We have a requirement to backup several replicated VM's from site "B", to tape, with CommVault for long term retention, at site "A". While I have been able to accomplish this by "manually" browsing the datastore, and sifting through the .snapshot folder, and adding the VM(s) to inventory, I was wondering if this process could be automated or even simplified? Does anyone know if the numbered folders inside the .snapshot folder change regularly? If they do not, then I could possibly automate with a script. Thanks in Advance! Tim

Hi there, I plan to backup our VDI on Nutanix cluster, I see Nutanix Veeam integration. Anyone who has implemented this ? TIA,

Hi All, Has anyone have experience doing acropolis image level backup? I'm trying to take an image level backup on AHV nutanix by Symantec Backup Exec 2015 with File Sharing / NDMP method, but still failed. Thanks, Indra

Hi All We are just bringing a new Nutanix Block online and starting to move some production VMs.With our Veeam backup testing we are seeing noticeable stun (in some cases up to a minute of VM unavailable) issues with snapshot removals that are done as part of Veeam backups. We have a veeam proxy installed on the nutanix NFS datastore, and are running vsphere6, latest Nutanix OS, etc. and latest version of Veeam 9.5.I did find a article on Nutanix forums about forcing NDB/network mode to help with this and this did improve thing but not enough to call it resolved. I cannot have my primary SQL server stunned every time we do a backup, so this is a bit of show stopper at this point.Just looking for ideas at this point?Jeff

Hi All, i'm using Networker to backup VMs over Nutanix/Hyper-V, the VM itself is being backed up but the config files.XML is failing for some reason related to access permissions. Any idea how to change permissions on datastore or config files? Thanks, Pierre

How can I copy guest VM's couple WIN2012R2 and Cent0S off to a network file share? Need to ensure I have backups prior to testing cluster convert. Thanks in advance

Hi, When running NCC on one of the customers cluster, the following output is generated... FAIL: Remote site: HQ-NTNXNumber of vstores mapped for the local site on the remote site are not same.Refer to KB 3335 (http://portal.nutanix.com/kb/3335) for details on remote_site_config_check or Recheck with: ncc health_checks data_protection_checks remote_site_checks remote_site_config_check Why is it so important to have the same number of mappings? When we are replication from site A to site B, we can use different mappings than when replication is executed from site B to site A. Regards, Bart

Hello everyone, I am wondering if anyone had any insights on how to get a succesful backup with veeam and nutanix and if there is something I am just overlooking. I know I am oversimplifying but I have followed the best practices setup and have checked all of the settings twice but somehow I still get the following error: 12/5/2015 1:30:11 PM :: Unable to allocate processing resources. Error: Provider [{89300202-3cec-4981-9171-19f59559e0f2}] does not support shadow copies of volume [\LSSHARE01LIFE_NTNX01].--tr:Failed to add volumes to the snapshot set.--tr:Failed to perform pre-backup tasks. I could have sworn that if NOS is added to AD then the share can use the VSS. I am frankly not finding any information on this and have gone from logs, to accounts, to verifying the storage. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Hi all, For a customer, I have a many-to-one replication implemented. On the DR-site, I want to back-up all VMs on the AHV cluster with Commvault... However, because the VM's are in a protection Domain, Commvault cannot discover them, so a back-up is not possible... Solution might be to export all vms from the latest snapshot, backup the vms, and delete the exported Vms from the DR cluster. I tried to do this with the Powershell shell cmdlets, but not successfully... Anyone tried this before? Regards, Bart

I am new to our environment and have been tasked with backing up our VM Servers. The backups are scheduled hourly but have not been configured properly (I believe we are missing a backup location, but I have not been able to find where to configure that item). Any help would be appreciated.

Hi , trying to restore a VM from local snapshot to a new VM and error Error restoring snapshot. NFS path 'OL6-11-2R' is not valid any assitance appreciated Tom

Hi All I'm a Nutanix partner in Thailand, when I present Nutanix product in DR feature one question alway arise from the customers who seriously interest in this feature. "How to caculate WAN bandwidth ?", that mean to how effective compression and deduplication of DR feature. I can not find this information on the Google and Nutanix site. Please advise me. TIA.

Anyone aware of a problem when using (unable to authenticate) domain local AD groups in PC 4.6? Worked before we upgraded to 4.6, but seems that a domain local AD group fails.

Is there any change Nutanix will expose API for Third Party to use Nuatnix Time Stream, and snapshot for Backup Solutions like Netbackup. vF.P

Hi, I'm still digging into Async DR functionality. As I understand, Async DR will replicate changed blocks from Site A to Site B at given interval from an active protection domain to an inactive protection domain. Let's say now, I do a Site A shutdown to test the DR processes. I therefore activate site B protection domain, register the virtual machines, and boot them. So far, so good. Now, I restart site A, and I want to fail back. I shutdown all virtual machines on site B and Site A (if any running), deactivate PD on site A, and setup replication from Site B PD to site A PD, and run a manual Sync. Does this make sense ? And will this copy only data changed since fail over occured ? or will it do a full sync ?

Good morning... evening... night all over the world ^^ I'm wondering what are the technical differences between Async DR and Backup. What I've red in documentation is that Backup does not allow running the virtual machines on the remote site. This comes with many questions as I couldn't find any detailed description of the backup mechanism. As far as I understand, both works exactly the same. Only difference is that on the remote site, the backup target PD cannot be promoted to allow running of the VMs. Is this correct ? is this the only difference ? Otherwise, what are all the differences between both modes ? Any impact on the size of used on the target space ? ...

Hi, I couldn't find this in the documentation. As I understand, the choice of Async DR vs Backup is to be made at remote site configuration. I would like to replicate some VMs for DR, and some for backup only. Is it possible to create two remote sites in a cluster pointing to the same remote site, thou allowing to have one remote site set as " Async DR" and the second one as "Backup" ?

Thoughts I'd post this rather than bugging our SE over and over ;) Trying to get a disaster recovery plan in place to protect against a major disaster such as server room fire... We have a couple of clusters geographically separated which I have set up as remote-sites. Site A and B lets call them. I've set up a PD w/ consistency group with the VMs to protect and periodically snapshot from site A to B. Now in the case of a fire/destroyed cluster at site A... obviously step one is rebuilding a cluster at that site with the appropriate configs, but then... With a brand new cluster in place, what is the standard process to retreive the snapshots from site B back to the new site A ? So far, I've activated the backup on site B (as if it was an unplanned outage and left it off). and recreated the remote-site link on the newly built out site A. I am thinking I now create a new PD to shuffle the VMs/consistency group back to Site A and then activate there and I am done ? I know this

Hello, Has anyone had success making Hyper-V VM level backups up in to the cloud? We were going to use DPM to send backups up there but it requires an agent to be installed on the SMB server so it wouldn't work on Nutanix. We also looked at Azure Cloud Connect to replicate our containers to Azure but that is backing up at the container level and restoring an individual VM can be difficult. What have you been using to achieve offline VM level backups? My organization's goal is to go back to any point within 35 days and the backups must be in the cloud(Amazon or Azure, prefer Azure).