Disk pools and volume managers with AdvancedDisk
Logical volume managers such Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) allow abstractions to be created between the underlying disks/spindles and the volume on which a file system resides. Multiple small volumes can be created on a single disk and multiple disks can be combined to form a single large volume. Volume Managers can improve the resilience and data integrity for backups written to disk volumes used in disk pools by allowing mirroring and RAID configurations.
The AdvancedDisk storage implementation presents all mounted file systems as disk volumes to NetBackup. AdvancedDisk operates naturally with volume managers that work below the level of a mounted file system because it has no visibility of them and thus is not concerned with the underlying geometry of the storage.
Information about configuring disk pools is also available:
See Best practices: Disk pool configuration - setting concurrent jobs and maximum I/O streams.
Note:
While the aforementioned guidance applies to both AdvancedDisk and MSDP pools, it is important to remember that AdvancedDisk does not use deduplication technology and it does not support the use of the NetBackup Accelerator feature.
Therefore, subsequent backup images written to the AdvancedDisk disk pool will not benefit from deduplication savings and increased performance provided by Accelerator and MSDP. Without the benefit of these features, backups usually require more capacity and typically take longer to complete. It is important to keep this in mind when setting Maximum I/O Streams and Maximum Concurrent Jobs. Usually, these values are set lower for AdvancedDisk pools than for MSDP pools.
While most environments will leverage MSDP and MSDP-C as storage targets for workload processing, there are some situations when AdvancedDisk is a better choice as a storage target:
If the workload data characteristics do not deduplicate well, and there is no A.I.R. (replication) requirement.
The workload is encrypted with 3rd party encryption and no A.I.R. (replication) requirement.
Backup performance of database transaction logs or archive logs is increased when written to AdvancedDisk and there is no A.I.R. (replication) requirement.
If A.I.R. is required, then the images backed up to the AdvancedDisk disk pool would need to be duplicated first to an MSDP or MSDP-WORM disk pool before being replicated or duplicated to another supported storage target.
The use of the generic cloud connector as a way to duplicate images on AdvancedDisk to a supported cloud storage target can be rather slow. It is important to keep this in mind when considering the use of the generic cloud connector.