Zmanda Backup Server Appliance is a Vmware Virtual Machine with Amanda Enterprise 3.5 server and dependencies. It includes both Amanda server and client packages. All Amanda pre-requisites to perform file system and VMware backups to disk are installed. Additional packages might be required for backups of other applications/databases. Please see Zmanda Application documentation for details.
Server backup virtual appliance uses 64bit CentOS 6.7 distribution.
The appliance image is available in OVF (.ova) format. This image works on VMware ESX 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5
Disk space requirements: The appliance performs backups to disk. It expects about 130GB for disk space in the Vmware data store to perform backups. The minimum disk space requirement is 130GB.
To import .ova file, In the vSphere Client, select File-> Deploy OVF Template. Specify the source location in Deploy from a File or URL . Select the host where you want to deploy the ZBA. You will also have select the datastore for the ZBA virtual machine. Select the disk format as Thin Provisioned. When click Finish, the ZBA will be imported. Click on Power on the virtual machine to boot the virtual machine from the vSphere Client panel.
The default backup set is configured for backing up to disk. If you are planning to back up to tape changer, you will have to make the tape drives and changer visible to the ZBA.
After following instructions on the VMware KB article, you should see the tape changer and tape drive listed when you run the following command as root user on the ZBA.
# cat /proc/scsi/scsi
or
# lsscsi
When you are configuring backups to Amazon S3 Cloud, it is important to maintain correct time on the Zmanda Backup Appliance. Backups will fail if there is a time skew. Please follow VMware Knowledgebase articleon how to maintain time on VMware.