What are you using for backup Nutanix?

Hi all,
we are try to solve a problem related to VMs attached to Volume Groups (VG):
Our Nutanix infrastructure at the moment is composed of 2 clusters based on AOS/AHY and cross-replicated using the native protection domains as DR.
Excluding other standard VM services, we can say that the first cluster contain the OpenStack infrastructure (Database(s), Keystone, Horizon, etc.) and with the Nutanix OpenStack drivers we use the second cluster to generate the OpenStack VMs.

Right now we haven´t still found a software solution that have VG support and we discovered this problem using Cohesity. For the moment negative answer support of vProtect and Veeam and we are waiting for other answers.

Any suggestion?

https://www.hycu.com/blog/how-hycu-uses-nutanix-volume-group-apis-for-consistent-data-protection/

So VEEAM has recommended to users to use physical proxies for large installation? How big is "large" in that instance? We are using Commvault on a 34 node cluster and about to throw VEEAM on a 17 node cluster. So we are going to get some real world comparisons whether we like it not, haha.

jtempleton thank you for the details and certainly my comments were more of a general point, that sharing experiences (product, meeting with sales/se, POC, support, compatibilty and above all unique requirments by each company and price point) makes for a good discussion for other to consider.

We ourselves use have been using Veaam in our Hyper-V environment today and are really happy with the product and support. However, we are really eagar to see how Veeam and Nutanix partnership will provide us the same level of comfort and techecnology we are already used to. May be even better integration and quite possiblly the API approach as you have suggested that HYCU has adapted in supporting Nutanix AHV.

I am intrige to look at HYCU now to see what they do offer.

Thank you all for a healthy conversation as at the end of the day being an IT person what always is on our mind is "can i recover my data when and if I need to" 🙂

I am not attempting to spread any fud or misinformation. I am a typical, experienced, sys admin trying to cover a number of technologies in a complex infrastructure. I have purchased, implemented and used various backup solutions over the years for various companies.

Our old infrastructure used Veeam, backing up vmware servers on EMC Sans. I have used veeam since v3.5 and I am a really big fan of theirs and can only speak highly of them. I have run veeam successfully on our nutanix environment.

My opinion was based on a recent tendering exercise for a Nutanix backup solution for my company that I recently completed. The backup solution that fits my company would not suit every other company.

Commvault, Data Domain and Hycu came onsite and provided a demo of their solution, answered our questions and followed up with a proposal. We also engaged with Veeam.

As i said in my original post, commvault proposed we have physical devices, veeam propsed proxy servers in their solution. And to be fair to everyone the Data Domain presentation was poor as they couldnt get their demo system working. These were reasons why we selected Hycu as their propsal was a single app installed on Nutanix.

The system that was proposed by Commvault for my organisation contained physical devices because of the volume of data we backup. The Commvault solution was 5 times more expensive than Hycu's.

The whole point of forums like this is for people to swap, share ideas and experiences and help each other out, not shutdown people if you dont like their comments. If its only vendors who are allowed to express an opinion on here then there wont be many people left here.

I think there is a fair bit of fud in your post jtempleton. For transparency, I work at Commvault (Now: Customer Support) so take this with the usual vendor bias and skepticism. I have been working with Nutanix since 2015 and having so many solutions to pick from is a tesitment to the success of their platform and awesomeness of the community that has resulted.

You are incorrect on the integration point in your post. Most solutions now are integrating with Nutanix's data protection API. Commvault was the first to provide agentless backups (we believed :D) and no, it does not require physical hardware (grab a trial version and see for yourself). Likewise I think our friends at Veeam also provide direct integration now without the use of agents. I even think Veritas has announced or has support using agentless methods.

Sure, we're going to recommend physical when you achieve massive scale - but so will Veeam and other vendors if you need deduplication for any significant size of backup. The difference is that we do not need specialized dedupe hardware appliances at scale as we perform this using software only, where many would prefer you purchased a data domain, StoreOnce or other specialized accellerated appliance to handle larger datasets.

We're switching on the new API framework in our next service pack (3 days away) which will also bring CBT for AHV and Nutanix's much improved API model that does away with the older framework that we worked with Nutanix on since 2015. The old framework was tied to protection domains, so I'm excited to break free of that model and take advantage of all the new goodies.

Hycu does seem like an elegant solution, and I do like the approach, but no need to spread the fud. All of these solutions have completely different value propositions. Lets leave the good people here to try each solution on their own merits and keep the fud to a minimum.

In my case, I was looking at HYCU because we currently use Rapid Recovery for all of our physical servers. As we are virtualizing those server on Nutanix I'm looking at a virtual aware backup that works well with Nutanix AHV so we aren't backing up VM's with the old style client method. I'll continue to use RR with our physical servers.

We are currently using Carbonite Server Backup (formerly EVault). It's an on-prem or cloud based backup. I like it as I can do a full bare metal backup as well as files, sql, exchange etc backups. I have not tested restoring a bare metal backup to Nutanix. I have in Xen and VmWare and worked great

Yes, Veeam is good, we currently use it and are happy with it. Waiting for the release and annoucnement from Veeam to work with AHV.

Thanks

Is Veeam and AHV combination is not working?

If you have malware on your system that is encrypting files that you have not detected, then you will just be saving the malware and encrypted files in your snapshots. With a backup you can restore to a previous version. OK you might have some data loss, but that is better than losing a complete system.

If you have a requirement to keep month end and year end backups for compliance purposes then Nutanix snapshots are not suited for this. For longer term backups Hycu, Veeam etc are better for this.

As mikegelhar says in his post, its good practice to follow the 3-2-1 rule.

I'm new to Nutanix and this thread has me curious. Is it impractical to use Nutanix snapshots for backups assuming you have the disk capacity and a remote site?

How are you using Veeam Backup within Nutanix?