Zmanda Backup Server Appliance is a Vmware Virtual Machine with Amanda Enterprise 3.1.5 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 ESX 3.5
OVA format This image works on VMware ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x
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 machine where Vmware vSphere or vCenter console is running.
- Uncompress the appliance image using 7zip tool or WinRAR tool or bzip2 (on Linux) command.
- Importing Backup appliance image into Vmware
- Vmware ESX / ESXi 4.x : To import .ova file, In the vSphere Client, select File-> Deploy OVF Template. Specify the source location as Deploy from File. Agree to the license agreements and 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 and IP allocation as DHCP for the network. When click Finish the ZBA will be imported. Click on Start this virtual machine to boot the virtual machine from the vSphere Client panel.
- VMware ESX 3.5 : 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.
- Free version of VMware : Please use VMware ovftool. Please see OVF Tool User Guide for instructions to import OVF files.
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. 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 /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.
- To change the timezone used by the backup appliance, login as root and check the current virtual machine timezone by running the "date" command. The last three letters shown identify the timezone used by the virtual machine. Backup the previous timezone configuration by copying it to a different location: "mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.bak". Look in the directory /usr/share/zoneinfo to find a list of time zone regions, and cities. Copy the the most appropriate file for your timezone to /etc/localtime. Do not use a symbolic link. For example, "cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime". Set the ZONE entry in the file /etc/sysconfig/clock file (e.g. "Europe/London"). REBOOT the virtual machine.
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
Configuring backups to cloud
When you are configuring backups to Amazon S3, it is important to maintain correct time on the Zmanda Backup Appliance. Backups will fail if there is a time skew. Please follow VMware Knowledge base article on how to keep time on VMware.