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Force NBD Backup (instead of HotAdd) for specific VMs
I've been searching the manuals for a way to do this and all I can find is a way to force the entire Avamar installation to use one transport mode. I have an Avamar 7.5.1 installation backing up VMs in a hybrid Nutanix/VMware environment. The original installation was done by Dell Professional Services and, aside from operational updates to the jobs, nothing has changed.
As is well documented on the Internet, you can run into severe VM stun when HotAdd backups and NFS3 datastores are used together. We have a few VMs whose applications cannot recover from this long stun time. Nutanix does not support anything other than NFS3 to ESXi (for use as datastores). While long term solutions are being considered, I've been asked to find a way to force NBD transport for backups of affected application servers.
Is there a way to force a specific client in Avamar to use NBD instead of HotAdd? Ideally it would be nice to just make a simple change on the client object, but if I have to exclude them from a backup job and add them to a new one, I can do that too. Any help is appreciated.
ionthegeek
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July 23rd, 2021 05:00
The following KB article documents the flag for overriding the transport method for VMware image backups:
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-ca/000163288/esg136091-restoring-a-virtual-machine-is-very-slow-or-takes-a-long-time?lang=en
Instead of setting the value to "hotadd:nbd:nbdssl", set it to "nbdssl:nbd".
You can override the dataset for particular clients in a group (there's a checkbox) but if you have more than a handful, it would probably be better to put these clients in their own group for ease of management.