-
Title
vRanger LAN-Free SAN -
Description
How to configure your physical vRanger server to use the Advanced SAN (LAN-Free SAN) transport. -
Resolution
Requirements for a traditional LAN Free Configuration
In order to implement a LAN Free configuration, you must install vRanger on a physical proxy server connected to your Fibre or iSCSI infrastructure. You will also need to enable LAN Free backups for each backup job.
•
The backup proxy server must be a physical machine running one of the supported operating systems below. Depending on the size of your environment, more than one proxy may be required.
•
•
•
•
The backup proxy must use Fibre Channel HBAs to connect to the SAN on which virtual machines reside.
•
It is recommended to use two HBAs - one for read operations and one for writing (active/active)
•
vRanger must be installed on each proxy server.
When planning your proxy configuration, you must evaluate a number of factors and identify which are likely to become bottlenecks in your environment. Factors that you should consider when sizing your deployment.
•
The number of virtual machines in your environment is the main factor that determines the size of your backup infrastructure. If there are a great many virtual machines, you must either allow longer backup times or allocate a significant amount of resources to meet time constraints. As a starting point for testing your deployment, Quest recommends using 1 backup proxy for every 10 hosts or 150 VMs.
•
A factor coinciding with the number of VMs is the number of VMs that can be processed at once. vRanger includes the Maximum number of tasks running locally configuration option that will limit the number of simultaneous backups per proxy server.
As a starting point, plan on 1 concurrent task per CPU core. For example, if your proxy server has 8 cores, you should set the Maximum number of tasks running locally setting to 8.
SAN Configuration Requirements
There are several SAN configurations that should be addressed before installing vRanger on the proxy server.
Caution
Do NOT initialize or format the unknown or offline disks from the backup server - these represent your VMFS volumes. Any changes could potentially corrupt your VMFS volumes.
•
•
•
Run the automount disable command to disable automatic drive letter assignment.
•