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How to configure NetBackup Policies for Clustered clients

Article: 100028926
Last Published: 2021-03-25
Ratings: 5 5
Product(s): NetBackup & Alta Data Protection

Description

The information provided in this article is meant to supplement existing NetBackup documentation regarding use of NetBackup in High Availability environments. The information is to be used as a general guide for configuring NetBackup Policies for clusters so that a reliable backup strategy is established. This article deals with configuration of NetBackup Client policies only.



CONSIDERATIONS:

Under certain conditions, a Clustered Application Fail-Over may occur during the backup due to extra load caused by simultaneous backups on each host node. Careful planning should be used when configuring the NetBackup Schedules for a clustered environment to avoid backup times that overlap between the host nodes and the Virtual Server resources.

Use of ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES with clusters is not recommended due to issues with Snapshot technologies and Shared cluster disks.


To fully backup the client:

The NetBackup client should be installed on each individual cluster node.

A. To backup the cluster nodes (to facilitate a OS DR of that node if needed)
  1. Create an separate policy for each individual node of the cluster.
  2. Specify the actual hostname of each cluster node in the 'Client Name' field on the 'Clients' Tab.
  3. In the selection list, specify the Local boot disk(s) like C:\ and D:\ etc. and the Shadow Copy Components:\ directive
  4. Configure the Schedule so that the policies do not run at the same time as either the Virtual Server backups or the other cluster node(s) backup.
B. To backup the Cluster shared data (to facilitate the user-data recovery in case of data loss)
  1. Create an individual policy for each Virtual Server in the cluster:
  2. Specify the Virtual Server hostname in the 'Client Name' field on the 'Clients' Tab.
  3. Specify the Shared Disk associated with the Virtual Server
  4. Configure the Schedule so that the policies do not run at the same time as the individual cluster node backups or other backups of the virtual servers in this cluster.

Note: 

  1. When performing the backup of individual cluster nodes, the Shadow Copy components:\ directive is inclusive of the System State components and the EFI System partition of that node, so there is no need to add the System_State directive separately in the selection list of the policy.

  2. The Shadow Copy Components:\ directive will also backup the DFSR paths if DFSR is hosted in a cluster. Usually the DFS data is hosted on the shared disk of the cluster that you don't want to backup during the backup of individual cluster nodes. Thus you should add the top-level DFS directory to the exclude list of the policy as follows:

    Shadow Copy Components:\User Data\Distributed File System Replication\DfsrReplicatedFolders

 

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