Deployment Best Practices for Unitrends Backup

SUMMARY

Key considerations for successful and optimal deployments of Unitrends Backup virtual appliances, as well as quick tips for product trials.

ISSUE

Key considerations for successful and optimal deployments of Unitrends Backup virtual appliances, as well as quick tips for product trials.

Unitrends Backup may be deployed as a Virtual Appliance in the following environments:

• VMware vSphere 
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Citrix XenServer
• Nutanix AHV
• Amazon AWS
• Microsoft Azure

*See the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix for specific hypervisor version and feature supportability.

For more information on deployment details, reference the deployment guide specific to your hypervisor, available on our documentation page.

Most trials will leverage the virtual appliances, due to their ease of deployment.

The topics covered include the following:

• Basic Steps to Deploy
• Choosing Where to Deploy
• Where to Deploy when Protecting MULTIPLE Hypervisors
• Configuring Backup Storage
• Backup Mode Selection
• Sizing Your System (Backup Storage, CPU, RAM)
• Scaling Right

RESOLUTION

Basic Steps to Deploy

Virtual appliances are very simple to get up and running:

1. Download the virtual appliance.
2. Deploy the virtual appliance and access the web interface via a browser (http://<ip address>).
3. Configure backup storage under the Configure menu.
4. Add your protected assets under the Configure menu.
5. Set up backup jobs under the Protect menu.
6. (Optional) Register on our forum via the Community dashboard tile.

Choosing Where to Deploy

Unitrends Backup can protect multiple hypervisors and physical servers from a single virtual appliance and scale up to hundreds of TBs of protected data in a single instance. Where you deploy is sometimes dependent on the infrastructure available to you.

Rule of thumb:  Deploy a UB into each virtual environment you are protecting at the hypervisor level.

Following this rule of thumb will typically ensure we are accessing data using the fastest transport modes available for the VMs. Additionally, physical or virtual machines can be protected with agents using any deployment, which simplifies the decision based on the type of hypervisor you use.

Where to Deploy when Protecting MULTIPLE Hypervisors

If you have multiple hypervisors and wish to deploy a UB virtual appliance into each one, you can still centrally manage multiple virtual appliances easily in a single user interface.

When protecting multiple hypervisors in a single instance of Unitrends Backup, it is common to deploy in one hypervisor to protect another. While this does not follow the rule of thumb, it does provide the ability to use one backup instance to protect and deduplicate all your backup data.

In those situations, certain deployments are better than others.  The table below is intended to assist with selecting the most optimal hypervisor when multiple hypervisors are available.

NOTE:  Nutanix AHV virtual machines can be efficiently protected when deployed in other environments.  If you wish to take advantage of the Nutanix storage for backups, you should deploy into the Nutanix AHV cluster.  Best practices should be followed to copy those backups to another location.
 

Configuring Backup Storage

Storage Protocols

Unitrends Enterprise Backup can perform advanced, adaptive inline deduplication. Therefore, expensive deduplication storage devices are not required to obtain deduplication ratios of 20-to-1 or more. However, it is important that your storage is capable of processing the IO required for global deduplication across all backups.  For this reason, we do not support the use of 3rd party native deduplication hardware for UB backup storage.  (Such devices are fully supported for Cold Copy archive data).  

As a result, we recommend high-speed drives and highly reliable network connectivity to your backup storage.  Unitrends Onboarding will expect the use of host-managed datastores and virtual disks as a best practice, any other use should be communicated to onboarding in advance.  

The good thing is that pretty much all storage vendors can be configured to leverage Unitrends deduplication effectively. This is really a matter of using the best practice protocol. Below is a list of rankings for backup storage protocols to use when configuring your backup storage for optimal performance, footprint, and scalability.
 

Third Party Deduplication Devices

Some storage vendors offer “smart” storage that performs its own deduplication efforts on data written to it. Unitrends supports these devices for Cold-Copy archive storage, but does not support them for primary backup storage. 

Backup Mode Selection

Unitrends supports a number of backup modes to ensure flexible protection policies for various types of data. A single job can use one backup mode, but UB can leverage multiple backup modes across various jobs. The below table will help you choose the best mode for your strategy.

Sizing Your System

CPU, memory and backup storage configurations are critical for proper operation and performance. With UB virtual appliances, these can very easily be increased due to the benefits of virtualization. This makes the process of tuning your backup configuration much simpler than any other deployment type.

By default, Unitrends Backup deploys with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM which is sufficient for basic deployment processes, but is not intended to be a run-time configuration for backups (see subsection below titled "CPU and Memory").  It is expected you will need to modify these defaults based on your protection requirements.  A minimum of 200 GB of backup storage is required for operation. 

A general rule of thumb is to configure a UB with similar specs to what would be included in an equivalent Unitrends Recovery Series appliance, though more specific details are described below.  

Backup Storage 

CPU and Memory

How to Scale to Meet Your Needs

Unitrends Backup can scale up significantly. It can also scale out, while still being managed by a centralized user interface. In fact, you can currently protect at least 6 petabytes (PB) of data in a single, optimally configured deployment by using multiple, large UB virtual appliances.

As you protect more data, 10 Gb Ethernet or 8 Gb Fibre Channel connections to your backup storage system become much more important to ensure your backup windows are being met. Fast, enterprise disk drives may be required for the use of our database to achieve the best performance.  Note, all of your storage does not need to be fast, only the portion that contains the Unitrends Database.  It is easy to move the Unitrends Database to faster storage following this KB: Move the Unitrends database off of stateless storage and onto a new partition

When scaling up your backup storage within a single UB virtual appliance, you can use very large virtual disks in your initial deployment or simply add more virtual disks. When adding virtual disks, UB will pool them together to create a single, large backup storage pool.

If you choose to add virtual disks for scaling, here are a few guidelines for optimal reliability and performance:

1. It is highly recommended to add virtual disks from physical storage that resides in the same chassis to avoid multiple points of failure for your backups.  Virtual disks do not need to be in the same LUN, but, if some storage is available and other is offline, this is highly likely to cause data loss and it never a recommended configuration.  When using deduplication the use of multiple separate physical storage devices may be denied support instead requiring the deployment of individual UB appliances connected to each device independently.  See Risk below.
2. Ensure all virtual disks for backup storage use underlying storage with the same performance class to avoid undesirable performance impacts.  If disparate storage must be used, it is recommended to deploy additional UB appliances as opposed to mixing storage in a single unit.  Remember there is no charge for deploying additional units.  
3. Use Thick Provisioned or Lazy Zero disks.  if a UB is over-provisioned and a LUN/datastore runs out of space the system may crash resulting in data loss.  Thin provisioned disks are not recommended. 

If you choose to use pass-thru storage over NFS, iSCSI, or CIFS connected directly to your UB instance, the following guidelines apply

1. Do not use a UB's backup share for any other purposes, the share must be dedicated to that UB and only that UB.  Any non-Unitrends data in that share will be detected and removed without warning.  
2. Multiple shares in the same NAS device should only be leveraged if each occupies an independent NAS volume or in cases where each share reports free space independently of other shares based on specified share size. 
3. No other systems or UBs should leverage other shares in the same volume for storage.  Reduction of the free space available to a UB by outside influences may result in unplanned purging or data, backup failure, or complete UB data loss.  Each deployed UB requires it's own dedicated storage volume or share.
4. Use of multiple separate NAS devices for backup storage on the same UB is not supported where deduplication is in use
5. increasing the size of your NAS through vendor tools by growing the volume is supported, do so only when the UB is powered off.  iSCSI LUNs can be increased in size but additional space will only be seen after additional manual steps.