Users Guide

Guidelines for Creating Backup Sets

Replay Manager creates a Replay based on a backup set.

A backup set is assigned a unique ID. It denes:

• Backup Data: One or more volumes or application components included in the backup.

• Backup Set Options: Options for the backup, such as the backup type and expiration settings.

Guidelines for Backup Sets in VMware Datacenters

Modifying components or options, moving or deleting components, and renaming source components requires the creation of a new

backup set.

To avoid needing to frequently re-create backup sets to account for component changes, create a separate backup set for VMware

components that are likely to be deleted, moved, or renamed.

• Renaming source components breaks the association between source data and backup set.

If a source component included in the backup set is renamed, and one of them is moved/deleted or renamed in vCenter, the backup set

will fail. For this reason, when source components are renamed in any way (renamed server or datastore, renamed database, renamed

VM, and so on), modify the backup set to remove the old components and add in the renamed components.

• Moving components between VMware datacenters causes backups to fail.

If a component included in a backup set is moved between VMware datacenters, the backup set is unable to backup data at the original

location and the backup job fails. Moving source components within a VMware datacenter does not cause failures.

• The existence of VMs with non-unique names within the same datacenter cause backups to fail.

If two or more source components included in a backup set have the same name, the backup set fails. For this reason, make sure all

source components in each datacenter have unique names.

Guidelines for Backup Jobs

Follow these guidelines when working with backup jobs.

• Replay Manager queues a maximum of one scheduled job per backup set at a time.

• If a scheduled backup job is running, it does not count towards this limit.

• Manually triggered backup jobs do not count towards this limit.

• Manually triggered jobs take priority over scheduled jobs.

NOTE

: Tasks do not have a limit. However, jobs (taking a Replay) have a limit.

In addition, follow these guidelines when creating schedules for backup jobs:

• Although a backup snapshot completes in seconds, the entire backup snapshot process—from temporarily freezing all application IO,

taking the snapshot, and then releasing all application IO—can take signicant time to process depending on the applications in use. It

also takes time to apply a retention policy. For this reason, make sure that a scheduled backup can nish before another backup is

scheduled to start.

• For large volumes and components, Dell recommends scheduling backups during o hours.

• At present, Replay Manager does not support backups for Storage Center Live Volumes.