13 – Phana Seng: VMware – Backup Solutions

VMware has taken market by storm.

Gartner Group: by 2012, over 85% of datacenters will have virtualization in some form.

Virtualize your servers into one physical ESX box plus drive up server utilization.

VMware challenges:

1. Backups – No free processes for backups
2. ESX server – loss of one more catastrophic
3. Backup windows – shrinking
4. Data sets – growing

Methods used today to backup VMware:

1. Install backup agent in each VM machine; nothing changes from backup perspective; can do full and incremental backups and single-file restores
DISADVANTAGES: In production environment it impacts all other virtual machines on server; must maintain/upgrade all the virtual machine agents; cannot perform full VMDK-style restore.

2. Install backup agent on ESX server console.Simple.
DISADVANTAGES: Requires powering down virtual machines in production environment; incremental backups not possible.

3. VMware consolidated backups. Requires a VCB proxy server; configure to access same datastore sets as ESX server. ADVANTAGES: Offload workload from ESX server; full VMDK backups; incremental backups and single-file restores. DISADVANTAGES: Increased backup licensing costs; higher storage capacity costs; need for temporary staging area; might need several VCB proxy servers (10 or more).

Alternate approach: use underlying controller’s snapshot technology in Nseries. Instantaneous backup with no impact to ESX servers. Allows full & multiple VMDK backups; full & multiple datastores; backup/recover single file.

Key Info performs assessment to determine best backup approach. Some questions:
1. What is your Service Level Agreement?
2. What is your Recovery Point Objective?
3. How much data can you afford to loose?
4. What is your Recovery Time Objective?
5. How long can you be down?
6. Will the solution scale up?
7. What is your ROI objective?

Speaker: Phana Seng; Senior Storage Engineer; Key Information Systems, Inc.; email psingh@keyinfo.com

Duration : 0:7:19

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