SMA Backup Procedure

[juselding]

Does anyone have any suggestions for backing up a VMware hosted SMA?  I see there is a way to backup to a secondary SMA, but we don't currently have a secondary SMA.  I am guessing my license doesn't allow for hosting an offline one either.

I have also read that Cisco doesn't support snapshots on the Appliance.  Would this prevent third party solutions that snapshot and backup the Appliance from being supported?

Joe

[Ken Stieers]

So, on the ESAv and WSAv you can deploy as many as you need to handle the mail load, they're licensed per seat...

I'm not sure how the SMAv is licensed... but you may be ok to spin up a backup.

[marc.luescherFRE]

Backing up of vSMA

a) the best way of backing it up is using the ESX tools to create a full clone.

b) an alternate way is to run a nightly SMA backup job to a secondary vSMA, created just for this purpose.

Note : Should you ever need to restore your backup for recovery reasons be aware that some policy quarantines will have expired and depending if you release ore delete those messages you will create a "mailstrom" on your ESA's. Also starting up a vSMA under those conditions can take up to 90 Min.

Should you use AMP and File Analysis end users might end up with some isolated duplicate emails as they will be released now 2 times.

[juselding]

Thanks, I am probably going to look at setting up a second SMA to dump the config over to nightly.  Thanks for the help. 

[Mathew Huynh]

Hello Juselding,

You are correct - taking snapshots is not supported by Cisco as the devices may not operate as expected when reloading from a snapshot.

I would suggest as the others had shared; spinning up a second SMA and running your same VLN - this VLN is licensed by seats and shared across the two if both are active.

Running the backup config gives you that redundancy.

Regards,

Matthew