(Posted to both lists, because it might lead to some development)
On Monday, 9. September 2002 12:31, Hauke Fath wrote:
> Am 09.09.2002 um 9:51 Uhr +0200 schrub Amon Ott:
> >I am currently investigating how to backup SAP R/3 systems on Oracle /
Linux
> >with amanda. So far I have found no reference, any experience with it?
>
> The "how to" depends on what you mean by backing up an R/3 system.
>
> o The R/3 binaries are "business as usual", as are the inactive
> database logfiles.
No problem there.
> o To back up the active database log files, you'd need to pause the
database.
>
> o To back up the database (content) itself, you'd either need to have
> the database dump its content to a holding disk, and back up that;
> or, you'd need to adapt the database backup utility to Amanda
> (replacing dump/restore/tar).
These two are the problem. The holding disk backup with plain brbackup will
certainly work, and that has already been chosen as my first step solution.
I'd really appreciate a good amanda solution, because this is free software.
On the other hand, our customer would certainly appreciate a reliable
solution for just a little development instead of significant license costs
for commercial backup software on a handful of SAP servers.
> >If nobody started such a solution, there might be a way how we could
develop
> >and maintain one. An official SAP certification is sure difficult, but not
> >completely impossible.
>
> AFAICS, Amanda "out of the box" does not support pre-/post-backup
> triggers ("stop database before backup and start it when finished"),
> nor does it support adapting a database specific backup tool.
The long term target would be a real backint program solution (the official
SAP backup interface), which gets called by a new amanda backup agent
additional to run-tar etc. AFAIK, only this solution could be certified by
SAP.
brbackup already supports full online backups in cpio format. As next step,
we could probably tweak this to go to stdout for amanda collection.
Another problem coming up is that a full database might exceed the single
tape limit, even with full gzip compression. And the database can only be
backed up to a single partition.
How far is the multi-tape backup implementation?
Amon.
--
Amon Ott
LISA systems
