Veritas NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide
- Introduction
- Required tasks: overview
- Notes and prerequisites
- Configure NetBackup communication with VMware
- Adding NetBackup credentials for VMware
- Configure NetBackup policies for VMware
- VMware backup options
- Exclude Disks tab
- Configure a VMware Intelligent Policy
- Reduce the size of backups
- Back up virtual machines
- Use Accelerator to back up virtual machines
- Restore virtual machines
- Restoring the full VMware virtual machine
- Virtual Machine Recovery dialog boxes (restore to original location)
- Virtual Machine Recovery dialogs boxes (restore to alternate location)
- Restoring VMware virtual machine disks by using Backup, Archive, and Restore
- Restoring VMware virtual machine disks by using NetBackup commands
- Restoring individual VMware virtual machine files
- Browse and search virtual machines for restore
- Restore virtual machines with Instant Recovery
- Use NetBackup for vCloud Director
- Virtual machine recovery dialog boxes for vCloud Director
- Best practices and more information
- Troubleshooting
- Appendix A. NetBackup commands to back up and restore virtual machines
- Using NetBackup commands to create a VMware policy
- Appendix B. Configuring services for NFS on Windows
- About configuring services for NFS on Windows 2012 or 2016 (NetBackup for VMware)
- About configuring services for NFS on Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 (NetBackup for VMware)
- Appendix C. The Reuse VM selection query results option
- Appendix D. Backup of VMware raw devices (RDM)
Linux VMs and persistent device naming
For Linux VMs without persistent device naming, multiple disk controllers (such as IDE, SCSI, and SATA) may complicate the recovery of individual files. This issue occurs because non-persistent device naming, such as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, may cause unexpected mount point changes after a restart. If the VM has a SCSI disk and SATA disk, the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface may show incorrect mount points for the VM's files. For example, the files originally under /vol_a might appear under /vol_b when you browse to restore them. The restore is successful, but the restored files may not be in their original directories.
As a workaround, search for the files on the restored VM and move them to the proper locations.
To prevent this issue on Linux VMs with multiple disk controllers, Veritas recommends a persistent device-naming method for mounting the file systems. When persistent naming is in place, device mounting is consistent and this issue does not occur when you restore files from future backups.
For persistent device naming, you can mount devices by UUIDs. The following is an example of the /etc/fstab
file that contains the devices that are mounted by UUIDs:
UUID=93a21fe4-4c55-4e5a-8124-1e2e1460fece /boot ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=55a24fe3-4c55-4e6a-8124-1e2e1460fadf /vola ext3 defaults 0 0
To find the device UUIDs, you can use either of the following commands:
blkid
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
Note:
NetBackup also supports the by-LABEL method for persistent device naming.