Yesterday at Lehigh University we hosted a group of 30 IT professionals to learn about some of the latest technologies around green IT and virtualization. Following the presentations we lunched on Italian steak, chicken romano, and cappuccino cake while attendees had the opportunity to network with one another along with representatives from Contour, EMC, VMware, and newly acquired EMC partner Data Domain.

Following the lunch we made our way down into the scorching sun where we watched the special teams practice. The most exciting part of the practice was watching second-year man Desean Jackson returning kicks. You have no idea how fast these guys are until you see them in person. The temperature was 93 degrees and after several hours of direct sunlight most of the guests retired to their cars for the trip back home.

Upcoming on the 20th is the Recoverpoint event at the Camden Rivershark game. I have heard that the Camden ball park is one of the nicest in minor league baseball due to it’s sprawling view of the Philadelphia skyline.

I did some research on what options exist for configuring BU with a Celerra.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/284987 (requires a paid feature of BU)

How to perform a backup of NDMP Filers (NAS) with the Symantec Backup Exec 11d for Windows Servers Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) Option.

“The Symantec Backup Exec 11d for Windows Servers NDMP Option lets Backup Exec use the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) to initialize and control backups and restores of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices such as NetApp filers as explained below”

I also found this article on Symantec’s site, which seems to explain a work around (although I’m not clear on how to get the mapped drive set up, because a network mapped drive requires a logged on user, so you would probably have to map the drives on the BU server):

http://support.veritas.com/docs/312057

“The backup of User Shares selection is specifically designed for Servers\Devices for which Backup Exec does not have an agent. For example SNAP Servers or NAS (Network Attached Storage) Boxes with an operating system that emulates Windows and a Remote Agent cannot be installed on”

I also found this on “Experts-Exchange”:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:QTNg1wbE1DkJ:www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Backup_Restore/Q_24195913.html+experts+exchange+24195913&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

You can try and backup the CIFS using a user defined selection list. The NDMP agent is going to require a dedicated tape drive attached to the celerra and a remote backup is done from the agent to the tape drive.  You should be able to see the cifs and shares on the celerra after you configure the user defined selection.  Please be aware that it may take a while for backup exec to read the shares and you may receive a not responding message, just give it time and it will complete.  Also the job will list as failed due to the backup agent not being able to be installed on the cellera, so you will have to check the log.

The topic of supported RAID configurations often comes up when we are working with clients and planning for a Celerra deployment.  The chart below shows the supported RAID configurations for presentation to a Celerra from a Clariion.

A couple other things to note:

The Celerra gateway system stores data on CLARiiON user LUNs or Symmetrix hypervolumes. If the user LUNs or hypervolumes are not configured correctly on the array, Celerra automatic volume management and the Celerra Manager cannot be used to manage the storage.

On the Clariion, The Host ID (AKA HLU) must be greater than or equal to 16 for user LUNs. An incorrect Host ID value can potentially cause serious problems and will not be presented to your Celerra.