VMware

Consolidate Backup and Disaster Recovery for Your VMware Environment

White Paper: VMware Data Backup and Recovery Best Practices with Data Domain

The Challenge With Protecting VMware Environments

VMware is virtualization software, which allows multiple virtual machines (VMs), each with their own operating system and applications, to run on a single host. Each VM runs independently, with the virtualization software coordinating resource scheduling for each VM on the server hardware. Each virtual machine is made up of one or more “virtual disk” files (.vmdk) and a configuration file that details the virtual hardware in the VM. Virtualization allows companies to consolidate server environments, resulting in more efficient use of server hardware resources, and provides a means for increasing the availability, scalability and manageability of complex computing infrastructures within data centers.

There are some particular challenges to backing up a virtual infrastructure. One option is to run backup agents within each instance of the virtualized operating system. However, with this approach the resource requirements of the backup agents running simultaneously within multiple VMs often results in a bottleneck.

Another option is to take advantage of the encapsulated .vmdk files, and use the built in VMware tools to snapshot, replicate, and copy these .vmdk files for bare-metal and disaster recovery. This works well, but has limitations as the VM either needs to be shut down, or the snapshot is crash-consistent, and not appropriate where this could result in data integrity issues. Also, these backups are essentially full backups and require vast amounts of disk space for holding multiple copies of the files.

Most enterprises create a hybrid approach that uses file/application agents when required (e.g. for consistent backups of databases), and snapshot copies of the .vmdk files for disaster recovery of the VMs themselves; relying on the operating system to handle the crash recovery on startup.

The Data Domain Solution

• Data Domain deduplication storage systems
• Data Domain Replicator software option
• Daily/weekly .vmdk snapshots copied to Data Domain via VMware tools or standard backup software
• Daily backups of critical data via backup agents running within the virtual machines

The Data Domain solution allows you to achieve:

• Fast, Safe, Cost-Effective Backup and Onsite Recovery: With Data Domain high performance, in-line deduplication technology, repeated full backups of VMware .vmdk files use a very small amount of physical disk storage. As a result, daily full backups to the Data Domain systems can use an order-of-magnitude less storage than block-level incremental backups. Data Domain deduplication reduces the storage consumed by a daily full backup of VMware .vmdk files by an average of 40-60x. Backing up the same VMs with backup agents results in even higher aggregate data reduction, as the data segments are redundant across both methods of backup.

• Data Domain systems deliver high throughput for high performance backup and recovery operations. Its Data Invulnerability Architecture ensures data integrity and recoverability of all backup data.

Data Domain Enterprise Protection Storage systems provide target for VMware

• Network-Efficient Replication of Backup Data for Disaster Recovery (DR): Data Domain deduplication dramatically reduces the volume of .vmdk backup data to be stored by an average of 40-60x. Because the amount of data that needs to be replicated offsite is so small, network bandwidth requirements are reduced by up to 99%. This enables fast and safe offsite replication for disaster recovery across the network — eliminating the need to physically transport tape backups to a disaster recovery location. This results in lower costs of operations by reducing storage and network bandwidth requirements.

  SAN-based replication of the very large .vmdk files is expensive and consumes a lot of bandwidth and enterprise customers do not like a DR plan based on tapes on trucks. Data Domain can shave 24 hours off the time to recover VMware servers and in many cases enterprise customers could have their most critical servers back online in a few hours instead of a few days with tapes on trucks.

  With Data Domain deduplication and replication, enterprise customers can backup and replicate entire server farms from one site to another on a daily basis, over minimal bandwidth and utilize minimal storage — remember a virtual machine equates to a bunch of large, very similar files. In certain instances, this can also provide a method for long distance business continuance failover, by replicating critical servers via backups, multiple times per day, and having those servers in stand-by mode at a distant remote site and restoring them periodically to the remote VMware host.

VMware Consolidated Backup utilizing Data Domain Enterprise Protection Storage

• Ease-of-Deployment Leveraging Any Leading Backup Software or VMware Consolidated Backup: Data Domain deduplication storage systems have been qualified for with the world’s leading backup and archiving applications, including Atempo, BakBone, CommVault, EMC, IBM, and Symantec. In addition, using VMware Consolidated Backup, a Data Domain system is an ideal storage target.