We are a networker-on-Linux shop with mostly Windows clients, and when we investigated CIFS with NDMP for backup, we found some of the limitations not good for us.
-- 0-9 backup levels is all you get, with 0 being a full and each following level capturing changes from the level before it. We usually do monthly fulls with weekly level 1 and incrementals in between, and like to stay flexible.
-- You can only restore to another filer. I had concerns at the time if you need 100% space to restore or if single file restore worked with NetWorker. I'll try to look this up.
-- EMC licensing for NDMP for a HA NetApp pair was grossly unfair at the time. There was a nice Celerra discount however… :\
CIFS on Linux works, and Samba is one of the most mature open source projects out there and even predates the modern Red Hat Linux distribution to a some degree. Would EMC support backing up CIFS shares with Linux? Maintaining ACLs -- Red Hat's ACL implementation is of the posix model, and does not map to Windows. You would likely be backing up the CIFS share with only the octal permissions that samba presents to the NetWorker client, but I haven't tested this.
Be prepared for a lot of overhead if you attach your share to a Windows or Linux client and configure this client in NetWorker. I would imagine SMB 2.0 improves this somewhat, but SMB is not known for peak workload throughputs.
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Andrew Laurence atlauren@me.com wrote:
Hi all,
We're starting to provide CIFS service out of a FAS2040, and we want to establish conventional backups with our existing EMC Networker setup, or our other NetBackup setup.
If we use NDMP, is the folder/permissions data in the CIFS volume sucked across, with valid integrity, in the NDMP backups?
Our Networker servers are based on Linux. Can Networker attach to the CIFS share directly, and haul across the backups? (Maintaining share/security data per above.)
Otherwise, does the Networker/Windows client back up mount points? We could mount the CIFS shares inside a Windows VM, and run the Networker client there, right?
Thanks for the help!
-Andrew
-- Andrew Laurence atlauren@uci.edu
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