Best Practice for backing up Dell EqualLogic SAN

[sean_anderson1]

Hello,

Are there any guidelines for best practices regarding Dell EqualLogic SAN devices and Backup Exec? Our current environment has a Windows 2012 R2 server with Backup Exec 2015 backing up several machines and VMs to tape. Our SAN storage is connected to a VM, and we are just backing up the VM with a windows agent and the SAN disk is connected via iSCSI to the VM. Is this appropriate, or is there a better method? The iSCSI disk is only hosting files and folders, no applications or SQL.

Thanks

[CraigV]

Hi,

If that is an RDM disk then you can only back it up via the SAN. If that was a normal physical server you'd be able to license and install SAN SSO via Enterprise Server Option and backup the file server directly to a SAN-attached tape unit. However, doing this after presenting a physical tape unit to a VM isn't supported at all.

What you could look at is backing up those files to disk located on the media server first before streaming off to tape, especially if there are a lot of them. It would be faster doing the primary backup to disk.

Thanks!

[Colin_Weaver]

Is this is a VMware datastore located on the Dell SAN - then you add the iSCSI LUN that contains the datasore to your Backup Exec server (in addition to your VMware host) and then use SAN transport to back it up.

However if you have just attached iSCSI directly into the VM then you will have to use the Agent for WIndows (or Linux) inside the VM to back it up and then connect your tape library to a Physixal server running Backup Exec to get the backup sets on tape.  (which is more or less CraigVs answer except if you are presenting iSCIS straight into the OS inside the VM then RDM is not involved.)