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 Post subject: RMC/Azure/MABS
PostPosted: Mon Jun 22, 2020 11:56 am 

Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:34 am
Posts: 67
Anyone used HPE RMC to backup VMs directly to the cloud?

The information online seems scant, but I gather that the RMC in Azure for instance is there only to serve as a place to copy data that is backed up to a local StorOnce Appliance on prem, rather than stream backup data directly from on-prem to the cloud?

It seems doing exactly that is what Azure MABS does, and sucks your VM data directly off vCenter and into your azure backup vault.

I had wondered if it was possible to setup RMC and use its built in vCenter plug in niceties to back up vms to the cloud from a mouse click inside vCenter. If not, then I guess we go down the MABS route, which as far as Im aware has no vCenter plug in yet.


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 Post subject: Re: RMC/Azure/MABS
PostPosted: Tue Jun 23, 2020 10:17 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 18, 2009 10:35 pm
Posts: 1328
Location: Dallas, Texas
Directly to the cloud would be facilitated with the HPE Cloud volumes. RMC can snap/sync a local Nimble/3PAR/Primera volume to a Nimble array in the cloud, or visa versa. The Cloud Volume can be mounted to cloud compute via iSCSI.

https://cloudvolumes.hpe.com/welcome/backup/overview

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Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.


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 Post subject: Re: RMC/Azure/MABS
PostPosted: Fri Jul 03, 2020 9:04 am 

Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:34 am
Posts: 67
Thanks Richard. Im assuming then that the HPE cloud volumes can be run WITHOUT an on-prem Storeonce device, and you can directly pull the trigger on a backup via the RMC plug-in for vcenter?

That would be cool.

Edit:- Hmmm, it only mentions Nimble storage in this link:- https://docs.cloudvolumes.hpe.com/help/


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 Post subject: Re: RMC/Azure/MABS
PostPosted: Thu Jul 23, 2020 7:04 pm 

Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:34 am
Posts: 67
I think the Cloud Volumes might work out too expensive for us.

I have a question for you experts about thin on thin, and whether this is acceptable or not. As a trial I have an AzureBackup server VM running on our kit, however with VMs with anything other than thin provisioning at the Vmware layer, it will use the full disk size it sees and eat up storage uncessesarily.

Our Azure MABS box is a vm running on prem, on the storage its protecting, and I sectioned off 15TB for it. If I thin provision VM disks, MABS sees for example SSMC as only 23GB, thick, MABS sees 512GB of course, and this seems a really inefficient way to stage the base backups of each VM locally.

Given the above, are we ok to use thin on thin for all our running VMs, and make the setup more efficient by not wasting space on the MABS server? Of course under the hood Im sure the 3par thin provisioning will see us right, but at the VM layer, MABS isnt able to see anything other than the size at the vsphere layer.

Thanks.


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 Post subject: Re: RMC/Azure/MABS
PostPosted: Fri Jul 24, 2020 4:27 am 

Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2015 2:11 pm
Posts: 1570
Location: Europe
If I got the essence of your post, you are asking if you could/should do thin on thin.

The simple answer is "hell yeah" followed by " as long as parts of the chain support unmap".

For Vmware that means minimum ESXi 6.5 and VMFS6. For Hyper-V that just means sticking to the defaults.

Keep in mind that some appliances "require" full provisioned disks. In most cases they work fine on thin, but it would be unsupported. In most environments that is a very small percentage of the total and in many cases doesn't require backup.

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 Post subject: Re: RMC/Azure/MABS
PostPosted: Fri Jul 24, 2020 10:51 am 

Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:34 am
Posts: 67
lol..!

I guess to put it simply..
- We have an azure backup server running on our vmware setup as a VM on the 3par, the same array that other production VMs are running on.
- Its got ~15TB of slower tier storage attached to it.
- Azure backup caches a copy of the VMs locally before uploading to cloud.
- Azure backup sees the VM disks as presented to VMware, so sees say SSMC as 512GB as its thick provisioned.

- Logically it would seem Azure Backup would fill its 3par attached storage with a load of thick zeros as it would be unable to determine where the data ends in a thick lazy zero'd disk.

- As a test before running any backups, I swapped a vm to a thin disk, and Azure backup saw a 500GB drive as only 23GB.

We have thin of course enabled by default on the array, but it would seem to prevent Azure backup from wasting its time with zero'd data, we would need to run thin on thin.

Hope this makes sense, I dont think I did a very good job of explaining!


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