BackUp for Starwind Server 5.4

[awedio]

Will this setup work?

o/s is 2008 R2
Disk 0 (80GB boot disk) = Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G2R5 [o/s install]
Disk 1 (80GB apps disk) = Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G2R5 [Starwind install & .IMG files]
Disk 2 (160GB backup disk) = Seagate SATA HDD [backup images]

Since I have no redundancy on Disks 0 and 1.
Can I use Windows Server backup to store backup images on Disk 2?

[Aitor_Ibarra]

I don't think this will work from the point of you of your clients (the other machines that have the iSCSI initiators). They have no way of knowing when a backup is going to happen, so your backups won't be consistent. What you could do is set up some iSCSI targets on Starwind that your clients use as backup drives, and then have these included in your backup of Starwind.

Another issue: with WSB, you really need at least 1.5x capacity of what you are backing up. So for 2x 80GB, you should have at least a 250GB drive for backups. Unless you intend to use smaller partitions on the SSDs (a good idea to increase their longevity).

Unless you are going to be putting a lot of other stuff on this server, and assuming you want to stick with Intel X25s, I would get the cheaper 40GB X25-V for your boot and the larger 160GB X25-M for your starwind data. Also, installing Starwind on the boot drive is fine, it doesn't have to be on the same disk as the .img files.

Hope this helps,

Aitor

[awedio]

I don't think this will work from the point of you of your clients (the other machines that have the iSCSI initiators). They have no way of knowing when a backup is going to happen, so your backups won't be consistent. What you could do is set up some iSCSI targets on Starwind that your clients use as backup drives, and then have these included in your backup of Starwind.

Aitor,
thx for the info. please re-explain your above quote.

I can always use a larger drive for the backup. (per your suggestion)
Only the o/s (and possibly Starwind) is installed on the 80gb boot disk. Used space is 21.3gb (includes pagefile = 12.3gb)
The 2nd disk will only "contain" 4x 10gb LUN's.

I wonder if there is any "benefit/advantage" to installing Starwind on the boot drive vs. installing on the 2nd disk?

Femi

[Aitor_Ibarra]

OK, I will try to make it clearer. It really depends on your applications. For an example I'm going to pretend that you're using a database type application.

Imagine you have a db box, which uses your starwind box for storage. The database is in the middle of a write operation when the starwind box is backed up. The database didn't know a backup was going to happen, so didn't make sure it finished it's writes. You never have a drive failure, so you don't have to restore from backup, so you aren't aware that there's a problem.

Then a drive on the Starwind box packs up. The targets your db box uses are gone. You have recent backup. You restore the img's and Starwind seems to be running OK. You reconnect your db to the targets and... all the database write operations that were in progress when the backup happened are corrupt. The database has to rely on its transaction logs to rebuild. Result: you've lost a bit more data than you would expect, and it's taken longer for you restore the database to working condition. Applications that don't use transaction logs could be in a worse situation. E.g. if it's just files, then any files that were being written to may be corrupt.

The solution is for the database box to back itself up, and then restore that backup (which would be included in your starwind back up). Also, *test* your backups.

I use WSB a fair bit and most of the time it works very well, although I've never used it to backup Starwind. Incremental backups are very fast. You can get a problem with a swollen Windows registry which slows down windows startup if you do lots of frequent backups - there's a hotfix from MS for this now...

Where you store Starwind app - there are pros and cons. Starwind does a fair bit of logging, so you get a tiny (with SSDs)performance boost if this is on a different drive to where your data is. If you were going to fill your data drive with 20GB images, then you may run out of space for the log, so if you have space left on your boot disk, that's where I would install Starwind.

[awedio]

Aitor,

Well said, thx for the detailed info.

I now understand, using WSB (the way I've described) will only yield crash consistent backups.

What is the recommended procedure for application consistent backups of .img files?

Femi

[Max (staff)]

Folks, what's the sence in reinventing the bicycle? StarWind has it's own snapshot feature which does support VSS.
If you need to have a consistent backup you can just use it instead of regular image file.
If you want to keep backups on a separate drive you just use WSB to backup the parent volume file.

[Aitor_Ibarra]

But the VSS feature is for the client, isn't it? So that's really a client triggered backup solution. The VSS provider tells Starwind to do a snapshot, but it's still the client which is in charge of scheduling the backup, and making sure all applications get into a consistent state.

However, using the VSS provider on the clients and running WSB on starwind and copying parent + snapshots, you should be safe for everything except the most recent snapshot, assuming old snapshots are never written to?

[awedio]

Aitor,

"....also I am running Starwind as a hyper-V VM...." (your reply from another forum post)

I made the assumption (no valid reason) that Starwind + o/s was a "bare metal" install only?
If I can run Starwind as a Hyper-V vm, I would just "backup/copy" the vhd!

For those that have done extensive testing, what are the drawbacks of running Starwind as a vm?

[anton (staff)]

1) Performance. Even keeping in mind Linux-based StarWind is noticeably *FASTER* then Windows-based StarWind (b/c Linux has much lighter storage and network stacks so delays in I/O processing are shorter "out-of-box" - really old news...) you're going to have maybe 40 to 60 percent performance degradation compared to OS native version. OK for non-performance critical tasks (target for remote replication or tier-2 storage or weekly backup appliance running overnight job or just "test and development" - tons of them!) but for some of the production (huge databases with multi gigabyte cached I/O or number crunching cluster or many virtual machine hyper visors with hyper visor HA in mind - again tons of them) lack of performance could be a real killer.

2) We have some issues with HA configuration running inside virtual machine. Even with v5.5 of StarWind (it does not use single link between HA nodes so it does not face so-called "brain split issue") b/c of the delays in VMotion, Live Migration and XenMotion and b/c of the delays emulated network stack has we cannot have reliable HA inside virtual machine *YET*. But after making sure VSA is adopted and runs fine we'll re-enable "HA when running inside virtual machine" soon FYI.

Aitor,

"....also I am running Starwind as a hyper-V VM...." (your reply from another forum post)

I made the assumption (no valid reason) that Starwind + o/s was a "bare metal" install only?
If I can run Starwind as a Hyper-V vm, I would just "backup/copy" the vhd!

For those that have done extensive testing, what are the drawbacks of running Starwind as a vm?