Scenario
You have Acronis Cyber Infrastructure rolled out in VMware environment.
You want to create VMware native snapshots of virtual machines serving as Acronis Cyber Infrastructure (ACI) cluster nodes and be able to restore from these snapshots.
Solution
When setting up snapshots, take the following into consideration:
- VMware snapshots can be considered as backup option for non-HA clusters. High-availability clusters have data redundancy, which means that copies of each piece of data are stored across different storage nodes to ensure that the data is available even if some of the storage nodes are inaccessible. Plan your infrastructure according to the documentation: Administrator Guide - High availability Concepts, Administrator Guide - Data Redundancy.
- There is no need to snapshot the entire infrastructure. Management node can be protected by built-in backup, refer to Administrator Guide - Backing Up and Restoring Management Database. You can make snapshots of VMs serving as storage nodes and metadata nodes.
- Snapshots should only be taken when all cluster nodes are offline. This approach can ensure that metadata nodes will be in sync after restore. Snapshots taken in a productive environment will capture metadata nodes at different state which will make their sync and further access to the saved data chunks impossible.
- Snapshots should be taken of all storage and metadata nodes. If you need to restore from the snapshots, all nodes should be restored.
- Avoid restore of ACI nodes from snapshots in case of external backend for disks (iSCSI) or backup storage (NFS or Public Cloud) is used as it may cause inconsistency between data on ACI side and external storage.
In general, follow this sequence of steps:
- Stop all the VMs nodes of ACI cluster.
- Create snapshots of the VMs.
- Start the VMs.
In case of any concerns - contact Acronis support before restoring ACI nodes from VM snapshot.