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.
Appliance Images
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.
How to use these Images
- Download the images from Zmanda Network to the machine where Vmware vSphere or vCenter console is running.
- Importing Backup appliance image into Vmware ESX
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.
Backup Server Configuration
- When the virtual machine has booted up, you will be connect to the Zmanda Management Console to manage the backup set configuration.
- 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. Please make sure zmanda-aee-3 is added to the name server or resolvable using /etc/hosts file.
- 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 Zmanda appliance's /etc directory to disk virtual tapes (under /var/lib/amanda directory). The backups will run daily and has retention policy of 7 days. The data disk of 125 GB is mounted at /var/lib/amanda directory. VMware backups use /var/lib/amanda/tmp as the temporary directory for backups.
- 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 as/etc/zmanda/zmanda_license 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.
- You should use Set Timezone option in the Virtual machine console to set the timezone correctly.
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.
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
Configuring backups to cloud
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.