Integrating Symantec Backup Exec with  Microsoft® SQL Server® Deployed on Dell™ PowerEdge™ Servers and  Dell PowerVault™ Storage   A Dell Technical White Paper

Database Solutions Engineering By Anthony Fernandez Dell │ Product Group October 2008

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THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.  ©Copyright 2008 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell.  Dell, the Dell logo, PowerVault, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc; Microsoft, Windows, and SQL Server are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.  Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.  THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE AND IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. THE ENTIRE RISK ARISING OUT OF THIS INFORMATION REMAINS WITH THE USER OF THE INFORMATION. IN NO EVENT SHALL DELL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE OR OTHER DAMAGES, EVEN IF DELL HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.      

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Executive Summary Designing and implementing a business continuity plan for today’s complex datacenters is a colossal task and one which should be designed meticulously. Maintaining business continuity at every level of the organization in the event of any planned or unplanned downtime is a critical and complex task, from power redundancy to server and application redundancy to datacenter site redundancy. In today’s enterprises, databases hold one of the most important asset for the organization. Any disruption at the database layer will affect the end user; the consumer of the data. Organizations today face a tremendous and complicated task of evaluating different type of solutions to implement in their datacenters to ultimately protect their core assets, database management systems (DBMS). Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are put in place as ways in which organizations can define the availability of each type of system in the organization, with production systems being the highest priority with more stringent SLAs. Often times, in order to meet these SLAs, administrators are faced with evaluating multiple technologies from various vendors that can meet those requirements. These solutions range from a myriad of technologies such as software and hardware, disk and tape, on-site and off-site, and short-term to long-term archiving to name a few. Dell and Symantec have partnered to offer a simple solution to help protect datacenters and their valuable information. Symantec Software Solutions coupled with standards based Dell Servers and Storage, offer a cost-effective way to run, manage, and protect datacenter environments. With the rapid adoption for Microsoft Windows® SQL Server® 2008 in the enterprise, Symantec Backup Exec 12.x offers a rich set of new features that provide a complete solution for maintaining data protection in complex environments while providing low cost of ownership and ease of use. This paper covers, from a customer’s perspective, how to protect SQL Server databases in a datacenter environment using the latest release of Symantec Backup Exec 12.x. This white paper documents and explores these key areas:

Database backup strategies Restoring databases to a point in time Archiving methods Centrally managing and scheduling tasks

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .......................................................................................................................... 3 

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................ 5 

INDUSTRY-WIDE CHALLENGES .......................................................................................................... 5 

PLANNING BACKUP STRATEGIES FOR SQL SERVER ................................................................... 6 

HOW TO BACKUP AND RESTORE SQL SERVER DATABASES ................................................................... 6 Data Loss versus Recovery Time .......................................................................................................... 7 High-Availability Strategies .................................................................................................................. 8 Challenges of Database Sprawl ............................................................................................................ 9 

HOW MUCH DATA NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED ......................................................................................... 9 HOW LONG TO STORE BACKUPS ............................................................................................................ 10 WHERE TO STORE BACKUPS .................................................................................................................. 11 

IMPLEMENTING THE PLAN ................................................................................................................ 12 

SYMANTEC BACKUP EXEC 12.5 FOR WINDOWS SERVERS ....................................................... 12 

SYMANTEC EXEC BACKUP STRATEGIES ................................................................................................ 15 Disk-to-Disk Backups .......................................................................................................................... 15 Disk-to-Tape Backups ......................................................................................................................... 16 Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape Backups ............................................................................................................ 17 

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 17 

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................... 18 

CONTENTS

 

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       7

Recovery Model

Backup Method Simple Bulk-logged Full Workload Type

Full backup Little to no data changes Full backup with differentials DSS/OLAP File group backups Large DSS/OLAP

Full backup with transaction logs

OLTP

Full backup with differentials and transaction logs

OLTP

Database Snapshots* * Only Available SQL Server Enterprise Edition Read-Only Copy of Database

Table 1 SQL Server Native Backup Methods  The second method takes advantage of data protection features provided via the Storage Layer. Each storage vendor offers capabilities and tools to clone and take snapshots of storage LUNs, volumes or Virtual Disk Groups. Some of these tools are freely integrated into their products, such as with Dell Equallogic PS-series arrays, while other vendors offer these tools as additional software bundles that may have to be purchased by the customer. Taking advantage of data protection features at the storage layer to complement a DR strategy plan provides extra benefits against unexpected failures. However, typically DBAs do not often have direct access to the underlying storage infrastructure to manage and create snapshots and clones of the volumes in which their data resides. This task is the responsibility of the Storage Administrator. Storage administrators are tasked with taking advantage of storage features that allow capabilities to perform local snapshots and clones, or replication across enclosures or across datacenters. A complete DR plan should include both methods. However, coordinating efforts between the two groups can be challenging. In later sections, we’ll show how orchestrating backups at the database layer and storage layers is possible with Symantec Backup Exec from a central management console.

Note: Taking snapshots or clones that contain databases while they are being accessed is not recommended. Either the database has to be detached or placed offline prior to executing a storage level copy or the use of the VSS capabilities needs to be enabled in order to ensure the database is not executing a transaction at the time of the copy.

Note: Microsoft SQL Server also offers high availability features such as Mirroring, Log Shipping, and Replication. For more information on configuration and best practices, visit http://www.dell.com/sql

Data Loss versus Recovery Time Based on the workload type, and the amount of lost data XYZ is willing to tolerate with the tradeoff of restore time, they need to decide which backup strategy better suits their needs.

 

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       9

Challenges of Database Sprawl In the previous example, restoring a single database in the case of failure was accomplished in a reasonable time. However, DBA’s are faced with the task of managing and protecting tens or even hundreds of databases across a multitude of servers spread throughout the organization. Protecting each individual database from component failures, server crashes, and human errors becomes more difficult as additional databases and database servers are added throughout the company. Figure 5 illustrates a non-optimal datacenter with no central mechanism to manage and perform backups. Each backup storage space is used to backup individual databases, thus creating management overhead for both storage administrators and DBA’s. Such an environment arose at XYZ during a period of rapid growth and expansion.

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Figure 5 Non‐optimal Database Backup Infrastructure   In this example, we have seen that many variables such as a system crash, or storage or network outage could potentially affect the database restore and halt operations. Alternate strategies need to be defined in order to provide high availability at every layer in the event of failure.

How Much Data Needs to be Protected While designing and implementing a SQL Server backup/restore plan, organizations must also determine the amount of data that needs to be protected and backed up. The volume of data directly affects the choice of products XYZ would have to select. As the amount of data continues to grow, companies are faced with the ongoing challenge and cost associated with backing up and storing databases for DR purposes. As XYZ adds products and services, their datacenter has grown from a single 10 GB database to 7 database servers, each of which contains an average of 3 application databases (Figure 5). Each database is on average of 50GB, with certain databases used for reporting measuring hundreds of gigabytes, and other transactional databases measuring tens of gigabytes. If they were to do daily-full backups on all 21 databases, the daily space requirement would be 1 TB. This number yields a maximum estimate. A typical backup plan would have daily and weekly full backups for some databases in combination with differentials and transaction log backups, and perhaps also some read-

 

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Where to Store he data?Short Term: MD10with 8 SATA II 1TBdrives in RAID5Long Term:  Tape Library ML6000

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   Figure 10 Backup Exec Media Server and SQL Agent  Company XYZ selected the Dell PowerVault DL2000 powered by Symantec appliance with the optional ML6000 Tape Library. Based on their capacity sizing audit performed earlier, the DL2000 appliance offers the right fit for a complete backup solution to use in their organization as part of their DR plan implementation. The DL2000 is a complete bundle of hardware and software preinstalled at the factory. The DL2000 appliance contains a PowerEdge Server with one or two processors, depending on performance requirements, and a PowerVault MD1000 directly attached for fast access disk storage. Additionally, it can also be ordered bundled with a Tape Library. For more information on the Dell DL2000 see In order to select the appropriate Agents and add-ons for Backup Exec, Company XYZ performed an inventory of their current database infrastructure to identify software versions and hardware that was in place. Because their infrastructure has evolved over time, the versions of Windows Server and SQL Server are heterogeneous. They are running Windows Server 2003 SP2 R2 i386 and x64, and have also deployed Windows Server 2008 x64 for testing. For their databases, they are running SQL Server 2005 SP2 Enterprise and Standard Edition i386 and x64 and have also deployed SQL Server 2008 Enterprise/Standard Edition x64 on both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. During the first phase of their Symantec deployment, Company XYZ had a business requirement to provide a centralized solution for management of backup and restore tasks for their databases as well as providing a long-term archival process that leverages the tape library. All of this should be accomplished through one single interface.

SQL Agent

•Supports SQL Server 2008•32 and 64Bit systems

Advanced Open File Option 

(AOFO)

•Protects files while in use

Central Admin Server (CASO)

•Manage Multimple Media Servers•(On site & Off site)

•Load Balance

Library Expansion Option

•Complete integration with Dell Tape Library Storage Systems

Symantec Backup Exec Media Server

 

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Symantec Exec Backup Strategies Now that we have seen the process to design and implement a general DR plan for databases using Symantec Backup Exec, another question still remains; How to start protecting SQL databases. We will look at three case scenarios: Disk-to-Disk, Disk-to-Tape, and how to combine both in a Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape scenario.

Disk-to-Disk Backups This strategy offers the reliability and performance of storing backup files on a RAID group provided by the MD1000. The performance and reliability is improved as multiple hard drives configured in a RAID configuration. Depending on the raid level, provides the redundancy if one or more hard drive failures. In addition to the performance improvement by spreading the data over multiple hard drives. Another benefit of the Disk-to-Disk solution is that offers the flexibility to have multiple concurrent backup jobs simultaneously without overlapping on the same media device.

Best Practice: Avoid Network bottlenecks, by implementing a dedicated network for backup traffic and multiple NICs on the Media Server.

       16

Disk-to-Tape Backups This strategy provides a central long-term solution that is widely used in today’s datacenters. Unlike a Disk-to-Disk solution, the restore time objective could be significantly impacted if the backup sets are stored in multiple tape media. Once the database starts the restore, unless multiple dedicated drives are available, it will be a serial process.

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Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape Backups This method offers the benefits of backing up multiple databases simultaneously to disk with the flexibility to move those backup sets for long-term archival on the tape library. This solution offers the flexibility to schedule archival jobs to backup entire volumes that may contain a collection of backups that are ready for long-term archival. Another strategy is to archive individually each backup set. This provides the flexibility to restore a database directly from the backup set to the original database server or to a separate server. However, depending on the quantity of backup sets, it may impose a management overhead.

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Conclusion Symantec Backup Exec and Dell PowerVault Storage systems provide a robust and cost-effective way to manage backup and recovery for a range of environments, from small to large datacenters. This paper discussed the considerations and strategies customers need to take into account to develop a complete Disaster Recovery Plan to protect Microsoft SQL Server databases using Symantec Backup Exec. In order to develop a complete Business Continuity plan, organizations are required to examine every layer of their infrastructure to implement redundancy at the hardware and storage layers. By developing a Disaster Recovery plan to protect databases, customers can rest assured that their most important asset is protected. Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 for Windows Servers offers a complete and easy-to-use solution to manage, backup, and restore SQL Server databases. With its modular architecture and large set of add-on components, Symantec Backup Exec offers an Agent or Option to fit any need, from protecting Web and file servers to database and tape library management.

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References Dell Symantec Alliance http://www.dell.com/symantec Protecting Critical Enterprise Applications with Symantec Backup Exec 11d http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q07-20070408-Symantec.pdf Symantec Backup Exec and Dell Equallogic PS Series http://www.equallogic.com/uploadedFiles/Resources/Tech_Partner_Solution_Briefs/SB104_Veritas_BackupExec.pdf Dell PowerVault DL2000 – Powered by Symantec Backup Exec http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/storage-dl2000-symantec Simplified Data Protection with Disk-Based Backup from Dell and Symantec http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps4q08-20080444-Symantec-M.pdf DL2000 Setup Demo http://www.dell.com/html/global/products/pvault/dl2000_symantec/DL2000_Setup.exe