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dkraut_23236's avatar
dkraut_23236
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Nov 02, 2012

LTM VE Backup?

Hi All, was wondering what others are doing to backup F5 LTM VE? Not the typical config/archive UCS backup, but a complete backup of the vm for DR purposes? While it's nice to have the confguration archive, what if the entire VM were destroyed? I want a way to quickly restore the vm in case the entire datastore were wiped out. Thoughts?

 

6 Replies

  • I often use the VMware Snapshot feature with the VE. This works well.

     

     

    Paul
  • Forgive me, I'm no visualization expert but surely you'd just backup the guest image? By the way, a UCS would contain the device configuration, SSL certificates and keys and more and you could restore an entire failed device with an archive, that's the point. An SCF would be just configuration but a UCS contains everything you need to restore.
  • Posted By ppindell on 11/02/2012 10:00 AM

     

    I often use the VMware Snapshot feature with the VE. This works well.

     

     

    Paul

     

    But what if the entire datastore were destroyed? The LTM vm and snapshot are now gone. All I have left is my UCS file.

     

  • Hamish's avatar
    Hamish
    Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
    So export/save the snapshot somewhere out of the datastore...

     

     

    H
  • The only thing that I can share with you from experience is, when we perform VMware snapshots our HA Pair loses connectivity long enough to make the other unit want to come up as Active.

     

    So your network guys will probably report back to you that they see IP address conflicts of your virtual servers and some arp response collisions while your snapshots are running.

     

    I have tweaked the failover wait to 3 seconds and it still happens.

     

    I havent seen this disconnect users yet, but if it were me I think I would schedule this at off peak times just to be on the safe side.

     

    Hope this helps.

     

    PS Check out the best practices regarding Virtual LTM's and VMWARE in the deployment guide.

     

    It leaves a lot to be desired but they cant answer every scenario.

     

  • Worth noting that v11.3 brings many improvements to VE. I can't test but you'd hope issues like this are less prevalent.