The 3X Appliance is a very useful backup appliance. So useful in fact that there are some things that you can do with it that many of our customers may not be aware of yet. So here are four things you might not be aware that your 3X Appliance can do.
1. Backup Hyper-V hosts.
It turns out that you can take VM level backups of your Hyper-V infrastructure. You can do this by installing the 3X Agent on your Hyper-V box and taking VSS file level backups of the *.VHDs. An excellent backup strategy can be formed by combining this with more granular backups at the guest level. This blog article goes into a little more detail on how to set this up. You can also backup the shared storage of Hyper-V clusters as long as the host you install the agent on has a mounted drive letter for the shared volume, or a hard link to it.
2. Backup Microsoft SQL Failover clusters.
As of version 3.1.25 we fixed the manner in which our Agent communicates with SQL instances to allow customers to backup SQL failover clusters. An explanation of our test environment which you can read here provides some more details on fail over clusters and their composition.
3. Backup SMB (Samba) shares.
SMB shares can be set up on multiple Operating Systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux and allow for your users to access a shared file system. Using this our customers can backup shared resources, as well as get around the lack of an existing Linux agent in our current version. This is done using the 'Network File system' as your backup set type. One experimental use of this on linux is to backup ESX servers by taking a snapshot and then backing up the vmdk files, and then removing the snapshots once the job is complete.
4. SCP Restores for Microsoft SQL BAK files.
Using the Web Manager UI you can initiate SCP sessions in order to download your BAK files directly from the vault. This is particularly useful in the event that your SQL box has gone down, you've brought another one up and you don't have time to wait for a Client Profile Recovery. You can check out how to d o this by taking a look at this blog article that covers Microsoft SQL Restores.
There you have it. Four things your 3X Appliance does that you might not have been aware of. If there are any neat things you have gotten yours to do please feel free to share in the comments. If you have any questions on any of these or other features of the 3X Appliance feel free to shoot me an email.
1. Backup Hyper-V hosts.
It turns out that you can take VM level backups of your Hyper-V infrastructure. You can do this by installing the 3X Agent on your Hyper-V box and taking VSS file level backups of the *.VHDs. An excellent backup strategy can be formed by combining this with more granular backups at the guest level. This blog article goes into a little more detail on how to set this up. You can also backup the shared storage of Hyper-V clusters as long as the host you install the agent on has a mounted drive letter for the shared volume, or a hard link to it.
2. Backup Microsoft SQL Failover clusters.
As of version 3.1.25 we fixed the manner in which our Agent communicates with SQL instances to allow customers to backup SQL failover clusters. An explanation of our test environment which you can read here provides some more details on fail over clusters and their composition.
3. Backup SMB (Samba) shares.
SMB shares can be set up on multiple Operating Systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux and allow for your users to access a shared file system. Using this our customers can backup shared resources, as well as get around the lack of an existing Linux agent in our current version. This is done using the 'Network File system' as your backup set type. One experimental use of this on linux is to backup ESX servers by taking a snapshot and then backing up the vmdk files, and then removing the snapshots once the job is complete.
4. SCP Restores for Microsoft SQL BAK files.
Using the Web Manager UI you can initiate SCP sessions in order to download your BAK files directly from the vault. This is particularly useful in the event that your SQL box has gone down, you've brought another one up and you don't have time to wait for a Client Profile Recovery. You can check out how to d o this by taking a look at this blog article that covers Microsoft SQL Restores.
There you have it. Four things your 3X Appliance does that you might not have been aware of. If there are any neat things you have gotten yours to do please feel free to share in the comments. If you have any questions on any of these or other features of the 3X Appliance feel free to shoot me an email.
