Scheduling Operations in NetWorker Aaron Kleinsmith EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2010 Aaron Kleinsmith P&E Consultant, EMC Education EMC² [email protected] Table of Contents Scheduling in NetWorker .................................................................................................... 3 Different ways to start backups .......................................................................................... 3 Group resource ............................................................................................................... 3 Scheduling the Group backups ......................................................................................... 4 On-demand Group backup ................................................................................................ 5 Restarting a Group backup ............................................................................................... 5 Savegrp ............................................................................................................................. 6 Savefs and save ............................................................................................................. 8 Windows Task Scheduler or Unix/Linux cron ................................................................. 9 External scheduling applications .................................................................................... 9 Using Schedules effectively ................................................................................................ 9 Re-occurring events in the Schedule ........................................................................... 10 Week or Month ................................................................................................................ 10 Schedule Overrides ......................................................................................................... 10 Backing up at intervals longer than a single day ............................................................. 12 Planning for dependent save sets ................................................................................... 14 Retention Policy ................................................................................................................ 15 How to use Directives effectively ...................................................................................... 15 Excluding files from a backup ....................................................................................... 16 Use Null or use Skip? ................................................................................................... 16 Using Groups, Schedules and Directives for Application Backups ............................. 17 Cloning and staging .......................................................................................................... 18 Overview of Cloning ...................................................................................................... 18 Backing up and Cloning with Disk ................................................................................ 19 Scheduling cloning jobs ................................................................................................ 20 Cloning as part of a backup Group ................................................................................. 21 Cloning using nsrclone .................................................................................................... 21 Examples using nsrclone ................................................................................................ 23 Retentions on Cloned Save Sets .................................................................................... 24 Using nsrclone with mminfo ............................................................................................ 25 Cloning by Volume .......................................................................................................... 26 Recovering from a Cloned Save Set ............................................................................... 26 Overview of Staging ...................................................................................................... 26 Staging Resource............................................................................................................ 27 Using nsrstage command ............................................................................................... 27 Other ways to schedule scripts in NetWorker .................................................................. 28 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 28 Disclaimer: The views, processes, or methodologies published in this compilation are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes, or methodologies. 2010 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2 Scheduling in NetWorker Many activities need to be scheduled in NetWorker™ but performing a backup is the most important. There are many different requirements depending on what type of system, what type of data, or who owns the data. These requirements help you to decide when to start the backup, how long you have to complete the backup, how long the data needs to be recoverable, and whether or not the data will need to be transported offsite. There are many technologies available to change the way data is backed up and stored. This great amount of flexibility complicates the way we manage backups. This article describes strategies that you can use to schedule backup and cloning tasks in NetWorker. Different ways to start backups Group resource Configuring a Group resource to “Autostart” at a specific time is the most common method to start a backup in NetWorker. It is straight-forward; just create a Group resource with a configured start time listed in 24-hour time (for example, a setting of 19:00 for a start time of 7:00 pm), enable the Autostart attribute, and ensure one or more clients are in the group. This type of backup is a server-initiated backup since the NetWorker server requests all the clients in a group to send data for backup. Which save sets that client will be sending for backup are configured In each client resource. When performing file system backups for clients, the NetWorker server will initiate separate save commands on the clients to start for each save set that needs to be backed up. Prior to starting the save commands, start the savefs program on each client to first verify save set paths or discover the save sets paths if a save set keyword of “All” was configured for a client. The savefs command running on each client helps build a worklist of save sets that will be sent for backup. The NetWorker server will collect the worklists of these save sets from each client, and organize the data to the needed storage nodes. 2010 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 3 Creating multiple groups to begin at staggered start times, and dividing clients between these groups is a good strategy when scheduling the backups. The size of the environment, the number of clients, start time requirements, and backup windows will help you to decide how many groups and when they should be configured to start. When you stagger the groups, the NetWorker server will not be left with too many clients and save sets to queue and manage at one time. This allows higher-priority clients to be backed up first by placing them in the groups that are scheduled to start first. Scheduling the Group backups Once a day backup The NetWorker Group resource can be left with the default “Interval:” attribute of “24:00” that will run the group once every 24 hours if the group backup is required to be performed once every day at the same time. Even though a once a day backup is common, there are some other strategies for scheduling the groups more or less frequently than once a day. Backing up more frequently than once a day is covered in the next section. The Group will need to be combined with an appropriate Schedule if there is a need to back up less frequently than once a day. Backing up at an interval time If you must do a specific backup more frequently than every 24 hours, the Interval attribute can be shortened to the necessary requirement such as 30 minutes (00:30) or every 2 hours (02:00). This scheduling works well when you need to back up data that changes frequently such as database logs or other types of transactional logging data from important applications. Backing up at an interval during certain hours Starting a backup at an interval can be very useful, but in certain circumstances there may be a window of time you don’t want the backups to occur – a black-out window. A group can start at a specific interval, but NetWorker does not allow you to stop that interval for a period of time. For example, if you need to back up transaction logs of a database during business hours and not at all during its nightly, level full, 8-hour backup 2010 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 4 window, the interval does not help to prevent any overlap between these two backups. In this case, you can configure multiple groups with needed start times and select them in each client resource so the client can start backing up at these required times. So if the requirement was to perform a backup every 2 hours during normal business hours (9am-5pm), five Group resources could be created each with an interval of 24 hours and different start times: