Forever Incremental Backups for Large Oracle Databases Hosted on AWS or Azure

For smaller to medium databases, RMAN streaming backups normally complete in the backup window, which allows weekly full backups to take place. For large databases that are several terabytes in size, getting a full backup to complete within the backup window becomes a challenge. The ‘forever incremental backups for Oracle on AWS or Azure’ feature allows you to schedule just incremental jobs every day and provides for creation of synthetic full backups on media on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The incremental backups use snapshots and complete more quickly because they only need to read a list of snapshot changed blocks provided by AWS and Azure APIs.

The feature has the following capabilities:

  • In-place or out-of-place full database restores are supported, and partial restores, such as tablespace and table restores, are also possible. Note that full database restores from a backup copy may be slower than hardware snapshot-based restores.

  • Instant clones from both a snapshot copy or a backup copy

  • Creation of synthetic full backups

  • Automatic handling of disk addition, disk size growth, and the addition of new volumes

  • Supported file systems: Oracle ASM, Extended 3 File System (ext3), Extended 4 File System (ext4), XFS

  • Supported volume managers: ASM, LVM

  • Supported operating systems: RHEL 8, Oracle Linux 8

Configuration

Configure the necessary permissions by using a policy that restricts access to resources that are created and used by Commvault:

  • When you configure a subclient for the database and a subclient for the log files, select Volume Copy (Block-Level Backup - Supports Instant Database Recovery) as the copy option (Create New Subclient dialog box, IntelliSnap Operations tab, Copy Option).

  • For Oracle, download and apply amazon_DB_FS_permissions.json.

    Note

    If you have previously downloaded and used the amazon_DB_FS_permissions.json file and want to use the "forever incremental backups for Oracle on AWS or Azure" feature, you need to download and apply the Commvault Platform Release 2023E version or a later version of the file, since it has the ebs:ListSnapshotBlocks permission defined.

  • For Azure, see Getting Started with Snapshot Backups Using Microsoft Azure Snap.

Sizing Guidelines for the Backup Copy Proxy VM

Use the following table to determine the sizing needed for the backup copy on the proxy VM.

Components

Extra Large

Large

Medium

Small

Extra Small

CPU/RAM 1

16 CPU cores, 128 GB RAM (or 16 vCPUs/128 GB)

12 CPU cores, 64 GB RAM (or 12 vCPUs/64 GB)

8 CPU cores, 32 GB RAM (or 8 vCPUs/32 GB)

4 CPU cores, 24 GB RAM (or 4 vCPUs/24 GB)

2 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM (or 2 vCPUs/16 GB)

Front End Terabytes (FET) 2

90 TB to 120 TB

50 TB to 100 TB

25 TB to 50 TB

10 TB to 25 TB

5 TB to 10 TB

  1. Assumes latest generation CPU architecture.

  2. Front-End Terabytes (FET): Size of the data on the client computer that has to be backed up, such as files, databases, and mailboxes.

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