




Configuring the backup-archive client in a cluster environment
The backup-archive client is designed to manage the backup of cluster drives by placing the backup-archive client within the context of the cluster's resource groups.
About this task
This gives the advantage of backing up data from local resources (as opposed to accessing the data across the network) to maximize the performance of the backup operation and to manage the backup data relative to the resource group. Therefore, the backup-archive client can always back up data on cluster resources as if the data were local data and maximize backup performance. This ensures that critical data is getting backed up across system failures.
For example, an active/active cluster environment has three physical hosts in the cluster named NodeA, NodeB, and NodeC.
The nodes have the following qualities:
- NodeA owns the cluster resource with file systems /A1 and /A2
- NodeB owns the cluster resources with file systems /B1 and /B2
- NodeC owns the cluster resources with file systems /C1 and /C2
For best backup performance, you might want all nodes in the cluster to perform the backups of the shared file systems that they own. When a node failover occurs, the backup tasks of the failed node shift to the node to which the failover occurred. For example, when NodeA fails over to NodeB, the backup of /A1 and /A2 moves to NodeB.
The following are prerequisites before configuring the backup-archive client to back up cluster and non-cluster volumes:
- A separate backup-archive client scheduler process must be run for each resource group being protected. In normal conditions, each node would have two scheduler processes: one for the cluster resources, and one for the local file systems. After a failure, additional scheduler processes are started on a node in order to protect the resources that have moved over from another node.
- The backup-archive client password files must be stored on cluster disks so that after a failure, the generated backup-archive client password is available to the takeover node.
- The file systems to be protected as part of a resource group are defined using the backup-archive client domain option. The domain option is specified in the dsm.sys file, which should also be stored on a cluster disk so that it can be accessed by the takeover node.
Follow the steps below to configure the backup-archive client in a cluster environment.