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  1. Home
  2. Veritas NetBackup™ for Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) Administrator's Guide
  3. Backup and recovery
  4. Back up the Nutanix AHV virtual machines
  5. Basic phases in a NetBackup backup of an AHV
Veritas NetBackup™ for Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) Administrator's Guide

Basic phases in a NetBackup backup of an AHV

The following table provides an overview of the processes that NetBackup undertakes during an AHV backup.

Phase

Description

Phase 1: Validation of the Hypervisor policy

NetBackup validates the Hypervisor policy that you have created to backup the AHV virtual machines. This step happens when you create and save the policy.

Phase 2: Initiation of a backup job

A backup job is triggered manually or according to the schedule that you have specified during policy creation.

Phase 3: Discovery of clients and commencing to backup the data on the clients

The backup process triggers three jobs - a parent job. a snapshot job, and a child job.

The parent job runs the nbdiscover process and the nbcs process discovers the VMs for the matching criteria and then starts the snapshot jobs for each of the discovered client.

Once the snapshot job completes, a backup job initiates that mounts the snapshot at the /usr/openv/tmp/ntxmnt location. The backup job then starts the actual read-write operation to backup the data on a disk.

Phase 4: Completion of the backup job

On successful completion of a backup, the NetBackup client on the backup host unmounts and then deletes the snapshot.

NetBackup Accelerator and Incremental feature uses Nutanix AHV's changed block tracking mechanism to get the metadata about the blocks that have changed between any two snapshots of a file. Nutanix requires two snapshots to provide this changed block information.

NetBackup provides previous backup snapshot details and the current backup snapshot details to get the changed region information. Once this data is collected, NetBackup deletes the previous backup snapshot and keeps the current backup snapshot for next job to get the changed region.

Based on the schedules in the policy, the following scenarios occur:

  • Full + Differential incremental backup

    Only the current backup job's VM snapshot is retained and the previous backup job's snapshot is removed.

  • Full + Cumulative incremental backup

    Only the last full backup job snapshot is retained and the current backup job snapshot is removed.

  • Full + Differential + Cumulative incremental backup

    Two snapshots are retained (last full and last differential incremental backup job snapshots) and the previously stored snapshots that are no longer needed for getting the changed block are removed.

  • Accelerator option enabled + Incremental Backup:

    Only the current backup job's VM snapshot is retained and the previous backup job's snapshot is removed.

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