Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Make Disaster Recovery a Breeze

238 Topics
651 Replies

238 Topics

Volume Groups’ usage for backup targets (Windows Server)

As you already know Nutanix provides block storage services in your clusters which are called Volume Groups. This provides SAN like capabilities by leveraging the existing hyper-converged infrastructure. Additionally, volume groups support SCSI unmap commands natively without having to turn on any additional setting as of AOS 4.7 in order to reclaim space from deleted blocks, more on that in the Nutanix Bible in the “Volumes (Block services)” section. However, there are certain caveats when using volume groups as backup targets so you must architect your backup solution wisely as you may have to consider losing some benefits in order to gain others.In this example, I will focus on Veeam’s feature of Fast clone, which you can read more about Veeam’s documentation here. However, this could apply to any backup solution that leverages underlying features from the file system to provide storage savings. In essence, this solution leverages the block cloning feature from ReFS in Windows whi

3 years ago

AlonaNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Quick Tip: Test a VM by restoring its copy offsite

Something quick for the end of the week.Did you know you can test a copy of your VM with no impact to the production instance?Provided you replication is configured to a remote site, here is how you can do this:1. Open prism element for the remote site2. Navigate to the Protection Domain (PD) dropdown 3. Find the PD containing the VM that you would like to restore 4. Restore the VM with a new name using Out-of-Place Restore restore option (and NOT an In-Place Restore).Important: Understand the networking setup and the testing scenario before executing the task. Consider turning off the NICs on the VM or assigning them to a VLAN that is not routed across to the VM’s original site or externally. Depending on the application it is possible that asymmetric data forwarding or conflicting announcements from the application on both VMs (the original and the recovered temporary copy) may cause data loss. Data Protection and Recovery with Prism Element: Restoration of Protected EntitiesIn case

3 years ago

MelissaAdamsAdventurer

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Recovery Plan Network Mappings

HI Everyone! Can you map a test network in a recovery plan to both the production network and the Test network at the recovery site? Nothing in the documentation around this. Our customer has VLAN 2 at the recovery location (isolated) and this is the network that matches current VLAN 1 in production. Since it’s isolated, they also want to use it for testing. Thanks!

3 years ago

DotexVoyager

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Data Protection and Replication

There are 2 nutanix cluster in different regions. I'm curious about a replication issue. I currently have 19.77 TiB free (physical) 50.7 TiB and 9.74TiB free (logical) 25.35 TiB disk space on first nutanix cluster site . there is enough free space in the second zone. I saw it through Nutanix. now if I replication 2 servers ( both 500gb ) in other region. in the configuration, local snapshot and remote snapshot 1 selected. How much to lose from Nutanix storage. For example, in the nutanix cluster there is 9.7 tb of free space, if I replicate 10 servers . 500 gb each. how much space will i lose on nutanix storage. Does this have an account? I want to learn this. I have 9.7 tb of free space, but I want to replicate 10-15 servers. Is there a problem in the storage area? How to calculate?

3 years ago

AdamaromusVoyager

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

VMware thin disk backup takes full disk backup.

Hi, Vmware thin disk backup takes full disk backup. VM backup size is entire disk allocated space. The backup is taken from IBM Spectrum Protect. Is this a known issue. Hypervisor: Vmware HW: Nutanix Any idea/suggestion ?

3 years ago

SudhirkvAdventurer

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Nutanix Mine with Hycu

Hi Team, Do we have any link which clarifies nutanix Mine (VMware) with HYCU backup. Please help with a link for docs. Thanks

3 years ago

a-a-ronAdventurer

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Unprotect VMs from Protection Domain NCLI

Hi there, I have many PDs and inside these PDs I have many VMs. I want to be able to run NCLI (or the like) to unprotect VM’s using a wildcard if possible. Example: ncli pd unprotect name=ProtectionDomain vm_name=VM* Anyone have an idea on how to do this to unprotect machines by wildcard to remove a mass amount at once?

3 years ago

DotexVoyager

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

keep the last snapshots for remote office

I created a replication rule in nutanix. I did not understand a topic. keep the last snapshots for remote office in Schedule area. Leave it blank and choose 1 or 3. For which scenario should I use this place? this option creates my return point. Another question is this; I have a thin disk 100 gb virtual server. It takes up space in the snapshot replication rule. How much snapshot space does it have a calculation for? thanks

3 years ago

DotexVoyager

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Veeam backup and data protection

I am backing up with veeam in nutanix cluster. I use esxi 6.5 on nutanix cluster I also replicate to remote office with some virtual machines with data protection. and backup of the same virtual servers with veeam. Is there a limit here or this building is made right. both are using the same snapshot. Would it be a problem if replication starts with veeam backup at the same time

3 years ago

HITESH0801Nutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Abort Abort Abort | A Replication Job

There could be some extreme situations where you want to safely abort an ongoing replication job. There could be multiple reasons to abort an ongoing replication job, for example: You want to delete a protection domain. You noticed some network issues between both sites. Remote site is unavailable due to certain reasons. Do we have a safe method to abort a replication job? The following knowledge base article mention the steps and procedure to abort an ongoing replication job safely from nCLI How to Abort an Ongoing Replication Job (Async DR) Prism admin account locked There might be a situation where you can get locked out of Prism due to too many failed attempts The login screen will prompt a message stating: Account locked due to too many failed attempts If you run into a similar situation, there is a method to remove the lock for the admin account The following base article might help you with the steps to achieve the same

3 years ago

YPPVoyager

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Nutanix Mine and File Server

I am new in the Nutanix so asking silly question could it be possible to deploy Nutanix mine and file server on the same box or hardware.

3 years ago

HITESH0801Nutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Planned failover of Metro Availability

Metro Availability creates a global file system namespace across Nutanix clusters and uses synchronous replication. Combining the Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure with a continuous availability solution limits downtime and preserves all data, even during a complete site failure. Further, Metro Availability enables workload mobility for disaster avoidance or planned maintenance scenarios. There might be a situation where due to internal audit, you need to perform a planned failover testing, planned maintenance, or disaster avoidance. Do we have a comprehensive guide regarding planned failover steps and the precautions which should be taken? The following guide explains the process of Planned Failover in Metro Availability with flowcharts and examples for better understanding. Planned Failover Want to know more about Metro Availability in the Nutanix environment? The following solutions guide will help you get a better understanding regarding the architecture of Metro

3 years ago

AntonioGNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Supported third-party backup solutions | Part 4

How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here is part three of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. ARCSERVE Top significant functionalities: Agent-based backup and restore of VMs for AHV, VMware and Hyper-V on Nutanix. Granular restore: File / DB / App / AD Restore / BMR to VM or V2P. Disaster recovery: Zero RPO and near-zero RTO with RHA to AWS EC2 environment. Built-in replication & high availability. Migration of disk images to tape, with granular restore from disk or tape. Supported hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V Nutanix platform OS: Arcserve UDP 6.5 Update 4 is validated on ESXi (6.5) & Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.5.5) Arcserve UDP 7.0 is validated on on ESXi (6.5) & Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.10.3.1) Arcserve UDP 7.0 is validated on Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.11) Arcserve UDP 7.0 is validated and has API i

3 years ago

BranislavVoyager

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Nutanix Leap

Hi, Does Nutanix Leap support ESXi Hypervisor for on-premise DR automation? In two different sources I have found different information: AAPM 5.10: Data Protection: Prism Central and Acropolis 5.10 or higher must be deployed on both sites. Orchestration is only available if you run AHV. Xi Leap Admin Guide (page 7): Hypervisor Requirements Supported Hypervisors On premises, the hypervisor must be one of the following: • AHV • ESXi https://nutanixbible.com/ Supported Environment(s): On-Premise: AHV (As of AOS 5.10) Thank you!

3 years ago

AntonioGNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Supported third-party backup solutions | Part 3

How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here part three of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. UNITRENDS Top significant functionalities: Native protection for Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor via APIs. Backup storage can be Nutanix storage connected directly or an external NAS. Extend long-term retention or full site disaster recovery to a second Nutanix deployment, or even the Unitrends Cloud. Recovery Assurance for vSphere, Hyper-V and physical Windows through instant recovery, automated backup verification, failover plans, DR testing and compliance reporting. Can use Nutanix snapshots for short-term retention and local VM recovery Supported hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere, XenServer and Hyper-V Nutanix platform OS: Unitrends 10.1.1-3 is validated on Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.5.0.6) Resources and getting started: Datasheet

3 years ago

AntonioGNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Supported third-party backup solutions | Part 2

How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here is part two of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. RUBRIK Top significant functionalities: Instant Recovery: deliver near-zero RTOs for Hyper-V or vSphere VMs by mounting directly onto Rubrik. No rehydration required. Global Real-Time Search: search for VMs and files with suggested search results. API-first Architecture: automate custom lifecycle management workflows that play well with third-party services (i.e. Chef, Puppet, ServiceNow, VMware vRealize Automation). Customized Analytics: deliver platform analytics across the hybrid cloud on data management, compliance, and capacity utilization with Rubrik Envision. Create and share data visualizations. Policy-Based Management: use an SLA policy engine to create and automate policies. Protects NoSQL Databases on Nutanix Enterprise Cl

3 years ago

AntonioGNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Supported third-party backup solutions | Part 1

How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here is the list of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. HYCU Top significant functionalities: Automated application discovery, application-aware backup and application-aware recovery. Prism like look & feel and a hypervisor-agnostic architecture to protect Nutanix and non-Nutanix virtualized environments. Fast file share (Nutanix Files) backup that is impact-free and agentless. WAN-free backup for Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO). Application-aware storage level snapshots. Full deployment of HYCU right from Nutanix CALM Marketplace Supported hypervisors: Flexibility and choice for hypervisors, either AHV or ESX. Nutanix platform OS: Nutanix AOS v5.1 or later Resources and getting started: Datasheet: Simple to use, Ready-to-roll intelligent application data protection for Nuta

3 years ago

AlonaNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

What if things go bad? DR options for my Hyper-V cluster

Whether your environment has grown enough to be ready to have a DR site or the scale of operations can no longer tolerate the loss of the site or maybe even a single application, the first question is “What are the options?”. And that is what we will talk about in this post. Starting with AOS 5.10 Metro Availability is supported on Hyper-V. Metro Availability is the solution if you are looking for minimal RPO and are preparing for a full scope DR scenario. Prism Web Console Guide v5.16: Data Protection The next in line would be Async DR which is a scheduled based snapshots replications essentially. Both MA and Async DR require a physical cluster. Since single-node clusters are not supported at this point with Hyper-V it would have to be at least a 3 nodes block. Prism Web Console Guide v5.16: Configuring a Remote Site (Physical Cluster) What if you are not ready to invest in hardware and be bothered with its maintenance? There are more options such as leveraging the mighty priva

3 years ago

JeremyJNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Snapshot reclaimable space showing “Processing” for a long time. What’s the deal?

If you need to clear up space on your Nutanix cluster you may be considering removing local snapshots, but what if the reclaimable space is displayed as “Processing”? What can we do about it, and how can we know if a snapshot is worth removing? The reclaimable space is subject to change and has to be totaled up before it can be known. This work is done during the same periodic filesystem scans which drive disk clean-up, post-process deduplication and compression, and information lifecycle management. Generally speaking we just need to wait for the next periodic scan to finish and then we should have the reclaimable space figure shown in Prism. If you need to estimate reclaimable space in the meantime, I can offer a few hints to help narrow that estimate. It helps to have a little understanding of how snapshots work, and how the reclaimable space number is identified. Think of it this way. Each current filesystem block has one or more owners, and any block cannot be deleted until no mor

3 years ago

AntonioGNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Nutanix Mine and Veeam

Nutanix Mine is the product name for joint solutions between Nutanix and selected data protection software vendors.Mine is a fully integrated data protection appliance that combines the Nutanix AOS software with the Veeam Backup & Replication solution. Mine can provide data protection for any applications running in a Nutanix cluster. Nutanix Mine with Veeam extends the core strengths of Nutanix software to backups. It integrates data protection software from Veeam with the software running in a hyperconverged manner on a Nutanix cluster. It is an entirely self-sufficient turnkey solution that provides compute, memory, storage, and now, backups too. Nutanix Mine with Veeam is also tightly integrated with the Nutanix Prism management console, which means that IT administrators can use management interface for both primary storage (as part of the HCI infrastructure) and backups. The Mine on Veeam can back up VMs and application data from Nutanix and non-Nutanix environments, wh

3 years ago

JeremyJNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

What to do about aged third party snapshots alert?

If you’re managing backups with Veeam, Hycu, Commvault, Rubrik, or another third party application then you may have encountered the alert message “Aged third-party backup snapshots present” even though nothing seems to be wrong. If so, you probably want to know why you’re seeing this alert and what to do about it. This alert doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem. It’s just seeing snapshot age. In most cases you just need to change the alert threshold which defaults to 7 days. See this article for more details about the alert. The phrase “third party snapshot” used in this alert refers to a specific type of snapshot requested by third party backup software using an API option specifically for this purpose. The backup application essentially has ownership of this snapshot. If your backup policy is set up to keep only five snapshots for this job, or to remove any snapshots over 14 days old, the decision of when to delete is made within the third party backup software. On the Nutanix end

3 years ago

AntonioGNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Two Common Questions on Protection Domain names

Q1: Is it ok to create protection domains on two different clusters with the same name with remote sites enabled on both clusters but PD is only setup with local snapshots only? Answer: It is possible to have a protection domain with the same name as the remote site protection domain as long as they are not configured to sync with each other and it is only a local protection domain. It is also possible to configure "active" schedules for that protection domain and retain the snapshots in the local cluster. Q2: Can a Protection Domain be renamed once configured and has entities and snapshots associated with it? Answer: There is a workaround available which is to create a new Protection Domain with this procedure: Create a new Protection Domain with the desired name and schedule. Remove all protected VMs from the old Protection Domain. Make a note of existing consistency groups. Add the VMs to the newly created Protection Domain, reconfigure consistency groups as they were in th

3 years ago

AlonaNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Nutanix Protection Domain and VMware VM snapshots — can they co-exist?

We love our VM level snapshots on VMware ESXi. It is a quick and easy way to roll back recent changes as if nothing has ever happened. It gives peace of mind and boosts confidence. It is not an answer to all prayers as, just like anything, it has its limitations. What are the limitations of VM level snapshot in a Nutanix cluster? First, let’s take a look at what are some of the interesting events that occur during the snapshot operation and its presence: If a virtual machine is running off of a snapshot, it is making changes to a child or sparse disk also called delta disk. The delta disk metadata in-memory of vSphere host includes the delta disk header. Updates to the header of the delta disks happen in memory as required and the changes are written to disk only upon certain events such as snapshot consolidation or when the delta disk is closed. Storage snapshot operations and storage replications are transparent to ESXi hosts. If the storage snapshot used to restore a VM wa

3 years ago

mmeiklejohnVoyager

asked in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Ad Hoc Snapshots

We've just gotten started with Nutanix, and I have a question about snapshots. Do I need to create a Protection Domain before I can create a snapshot? I'm not looking to take snapshots of a bunch of machines or have scheduled snapshots. I just want to make one snapshot of a single Windows server before I upgrade some software on it. We are running AHV as our hypervisor. Thank you

3 years ago

JeremyJNutanix Employee

posted in Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Connectivity to the remote site is not normal. What to do?

The alert text “Connectivity to remote site is not normal” may show up for a number of different reasons, so it may not be immediately clear what to do about it. If you have recently added a remote site configuration in Prism it could be some problem of configuration, but if you had Async DR replication working for several days before the error popped up the issue is more likely to be related to network issues or the status of the remote site. Since the cause might only be temporary, the first thing to do is to re-run the check. To see the full detail I recommend running this one from the CLI: nutanix@cvm$ ncc health_checks data_protection_checks remote_site_checks remote_site_connectivity_check If you see a PASS result now and no corrective action was taken, the issue was temporary. If that’s the case you may want to check the alert timestamp and look into whether the network or remote site was undergoing maintenance or upgrade, or exhibiting some issue at the time of the alert. Since

3 years ago

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