Table of contents
Zmanda Backup Server Appliance is a Vmware Virtual Machine with Amanda Enterprise 3.1.3 server images. It includes both Amanda server and client packages. All Amanda pre-requisites to perform file system backups to disk are installed. Additional packages might be required for backups of other applications/databases. For example: If you are backing up VMware ESX, you will need to install VMware vSphere VCLI (VMware-vSphere-CLI) on the ZBA. Please see Zmanda Application documentation for details.
Server backup appliances uses 32bit CentOS 5 distribution or 32bit Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 distribution.
Appliance Images
There are two Vmware images for each distribution is available for download:
VMX format This image works on VMware Workstation 5.x, VMware Workstation 6.x, VmWare Server 1.x, VMWare server 2.x, VmWare Player 1.x, and VMware Player 2.x
OVA format This image works on VMware ESX 4 and ESXi 4
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 space requirement for vmx format (thinly provisioned) is 1-2GB and for ova format is 130GB.
How to use these Images
- Download the images from Zmanda Network to the server (if you are using Vmware player or Vmware Server) or to the machine where Vmware vSphere or vCenter console is running (if you are using ESX / ESXi).
- Uncompress the appliance image using bzip2 tool.
- Importing Backup appliance image into Vmware
- VMware player: Select the .vmx file as the virtual machine configuration file in the pop-up dialog. If you are starting for the first time, you will prompted for unique identifier. Generate a new identifier. The virtual machine will boot up.
- VMware Server : Start VMware server. Select Local Host as the server to connect to. Use File -> Open menu item, browse the correct directory and select the .vmx file. Click on Start this virtual machine to boot the virtual machine.
- Vmware ESX / ESXi 4.x : To import .ovafile, use File-> Deploy OVF Template. Click on Start this virtual machine to boot the virtual machine.
Backup Server Configuration
- When the virtual machine has booted up, you would see an informational welcome message about the configured Amanda Server.
- The root password for the virtual machine is zmanda Please change the password before deploying it in production.
- The host name of the virtual machine is zmanda-aee-3 and it will obtain an IP address using dhcp.
- Access https://<ip address of this virtual machine>:443/ from Firefox or Internet Explorer to connect to the Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) running on the virtual machine.
- There is a demo-set backup set configured to backup /etc directory to disk virtual tapes (/var/lib/amanda/vtapes). The backups will run daily and has retention policy of 7 days. The data disk of 120 GB is mounted at /var/lib/amanda directory.
- Please download and install the Amanda Enterprise license file from Zmanda Network (Click Downloads tab after logging into Zmanda Network). The license file has to be installed on the Virtual machine for the Zmanda Management Console to work.
- The Virtual machine is ready for backup set configuration and running backups using ZMC. Please see Zmanda Management Console Users Manual for more information.
Configuring tape drives and changer
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.
If you are running ZBA on ESX 3.5, please see this VMware Knowlegebase article.
If you are running ZBA on ESX 4.x, please see this VMware Knowledgebase article.
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