This white paper discusses optimizing backup and recovery for VMware Infrastructure using EMC Avamar. It provides an overview of VMware Infrastructure and its components. It then discusses three solutions for backing up virtual machines using Avamar: backing up via the VMware Consolidated Backup proxy server, installing Avamar agents inside each virtual machine, or installing an agent on the ESX server service console. Avamar reduces backup sizes and times through global data deduplication.
Deduplication reduces the amount of disk storage needed to retain and protect data by ratios of 10-30x and greater, making a disk a cost-effective alternative to tape. Data on disk is available online and onsite for longer retention periods, and restores become fast and reliable. Storing only unique data on disk also means that data can be cost-effectively replicated over existing networks to remote sites for disaster recovery and consolidated tape operations.
Deduplication reduces the amount of disk storage needed to retain and protect data by ratios of 10-30x and greater, making a disk a cost-effective alternative to tape. Data on disk is available online and onsite for longer retention periods, and restores become fast and reliable. Storing only unique data on disk also means that data can be cost-effectively replicated over existing networks to remote sites for disaster recovery and consolidated tape operations.
Historically backups have been defined and referenced by the hostname of the physical system being protected. This has worked well when the relationship between the physical host and the operating system was a direct, one to one relationship. Backup processing impact was limited to each physical client and the biggest concern was saturating the network with backup traffic. This was easily managed by limiting the number of simultaneous client backups via a simple setting within the NetBackup policy.
Virtual machine technologies have changed this physical hardware dynamic. Dozens of operating systems (virtual machines) can now reside on a single physical (ESX) host connected to a single storage LUN with network access through a single NIC. When using traditional policy configurations, backup processing randomly occurs with no regard to the physical location of each virtual machine. As backups progress, a subset of ESX servers can be heavily impacted with active backups while other ESX systems sit idly waiting for their virtual machines to be protected. The effect of this is that backups tend to be slower than they need to be and backup processing impact on the ESX servers tends to be random and lopsided. Standard backup policy definitions simply do not translate well into virtual environments.
The NetBackup Virtual machine Intelligent Policy (VIP) feature is designed to solve this problem and more. With Virtual machine Intelligent Policy, backup processing can be automatically load balanced across the entire virtual machine environment. No ESX server is unfairly taxed with excessive backup processing and backups can be significantly faster. Once configured, this load balancing automatically detects changes in the virtual machine environment and automatically compensates backup processing based on these changes. Virtual machine Intelligent Policy places virtual machine backups on autopilot.
Better Backup For All Symantec Appliances NetBackup 5220 Backup Exec 3600 May...Symantec
Symantec’s latest backup appliances, NetBackup 5220 and Backup Exec 3600, which now include the latest NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 software from Symantec announced earlier this year. The new appliances deliver on Symantec’s Better Backup for All initiative to advance what Gartner has called “The Broken State of Backup.”
Symantec delivers on its deduplication everywhere strategy - designed to reduce data everywhere, reduce complexity, and reduce data infrastructure – by announcing Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7.0.
These products both integrate deduplication technology closer to the information source at the client and at the media server to help organizations achieve significant storage and cost savings and simplify their backup and recovery operations through a unified platform.
In addition to deduplication, NetBackup 7 helps enterprise-level organizations protect, store and recover information and adds improved virtual machine protection and faster disaster recovery. Backup Exec 2010 also adds integrated archiving and improved virtual machine protection, helping mid-sized businesses protect more data and utilize less storage - overall saving them time and money.
This technical paper discusses the deployment of a VMware environment and best practices in using IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) for its primary storage. To know more about the Network Attached Storage, visit http://ibm.co/SH8WJo.
Symantec continues to deliver on its information management strategy to enable organizations to protect their information completely, deduplicate everywhere to eliminate redundant data, delete confidently and discover efficiently with Enterprise Vault 9.0, Enterprise Vault Discovery Collector, NetBackup 5000 and the NetBackup Cloud Storage for Nirvanix.
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER▶NetBackup 5330 Resiliency/High Availability AttributesSymantec
NetBackup Appliances Family
The NetBackup Appliance family offers complementary solutions to meet the data protection needs of modern enterprises, and includes solutions such as the NetBackup 5230 and NetBackup 5330 Appliances.
NetBackup 5230 Appliance
The NetBackup 5230 Backup Appliance includes master and media capabilities, alongside storage and deduplication features that will meet the needs of small, mid size, and even some large enterprises.
NetBackup 5330 Appliance
The NetBackup 5330 appliance offers media server capabilities, and is designed to meet the needs of large enterprise customers with demanding performance and scalability requirements across virtual and physical infrastructures.
The NetBackup 5330 Appliance is designed to supplement the NetBackup Appliance family by offering key enterprise customers a large-scale and performant offering. This includes sustainable performance over time and scale, predictable job success rates under heavy loads, and powerful deduplication capabilities.
Data protection architectures are, by necessity, complex in nature as they involve so many complex factors. There cannot be a “one size fits all” approach to data protection because the operational requirements of each organization dictate how data is used, and the local risk assessment process dictates to some extent how it will be protected.
An overview of December 2009 enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, Symantec’s storage management and high availability solutions.
This release enables organizations to capitalize on new storage technology – such as solid state drives (SSDs) and thin provisioning – and improving performance and scalability. In addition, near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System, allowing for fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.
This white paper describes features introduced in EMC Avamar to extend VMware vCloud Director's service delivery and Virtual Data Center capabilities to include BaaS.
Historically backups have been defined and referenced by the hostname of the physical system being protected. This has worked well when the relationship between the physical host and the operating system was a direct, one to one relationship. Backup processing impact was limited to each physical client and the biggest concern was saturating the network with backup traffic. This was easily managed by limiting the number of simultaneous client backups via a simple setting within the NetBackup policy.
Virtual machine technologies have changed this physical hardware dynamic. Dozens of operating systems (virtual machines) can now reside on a single physical (ESX) host connected to a single storage LUN with network access through a single NIC. When using traditional policy configurations, backup processing randomly occurs with no regard to the physical location of each virtual machine. As backups progress, a subset of ESX servers can be heavily impacted with active backups while other ESX systems sit idly waiting for their virtual machines to be protected. The effect of this is that backups tend to be slower than they need to be and backup processing impact on the ESX servers tends to be random and lopsided. Standard backup policy definitions simply do not translate well into virtual environments.
The NetBackup Virtual machine Intelligent Policy (VIP) feature is designed to solve this problem and more. With Virtual machine Intelligent Policy, backup processing can be automatically load balanced across the entire virtual machine environment. No ESX server is unfairly taxed with excessive backup processing and backups can be significantly faster. Once configured, this load balancing automatically detects changes in the virtual machine environment and automatically compensates backup processing based on these changes. Virtual machine Intelligent Policy places virtual machine backups on autopilot.
Better Backup For All Symantec Appliances NetBackup 5220 Backup Exec 3600 May...Symantec
Symantec’s latest backup appliances, NetBackup 5220 and Backup Exec 3600, which now include the latest NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 software from Symantec announced earlier this year. The new appliances deliver on Symantec’s Better Backup for All initiative to advance what Gartner has called “The Broken State of Backup.”
Symantec delivers on its deduplication everywhere strategy - designed to reduce data everywhere, reduce complexity, and reduce data infrastructure – by announcing Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7.0.
These products both integrate deduplication technology closer to the information source at the client and at the media server to help organizations achieve significant storage and cost savings and simplify their backup and recovery operations through a unified platform.
In addition to deduplication, NetBackup 7 helps enterprise-level organizations protect, store and recover information and adds improved virtual machine protection and faster disaster recovery. Backup Exec 2010 also adds integrated archiving and improved virtual machine protection, helping mid-sized businesses protect more data and utilize less storage - overall saving them time and money.
This technical paper discusses the deployment of a VMware environment and best practices in using IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) for its primary storage. To know more about the Network Attached Storage, visit http://ibm.co/SH8WJo.
Symantec continues to deliver on its information management strategy to enable organizations to protect their information completely, deduplicate everywhere to eliminate redundant data, delete confidently and discover efficiently with Enterprise Vault 9.0, Enterprise Vault Discovery Collector, NetBackup 5000 and the NetBackup Cloud Storage for Nirvanix.
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER▶NetBackup 5330 Resiliency/High Availability AttributesSymantec
NetBackup Appliances Family
The NetBackup Appliance family offers complementary solutions to meet the data protection needs of modern enterprises, and includes solutions such as the NetBackup 5230 and NetBackup 5330 Appliances.
NetBackup 5230 Appliance
The NetBackup 5230 Backup Appliance includes master and media capabilities, alongside storage and deduplication features that will meet the needs of small, mid size, and even some large enterprises.
NetBackup 5330 Appliance
The NetBackup 5330 appliance offers media server capabilities, and is designed to meet the needs of large enterprise customers with demanding performance and scalability requirements across virtual and physical infrastructures.
The NetBackup 5330 Appliance is designed to supplement the NetBackup Appliance family by offering key enterprise customers a large-scale and performant offering. This includes sustainable performance over time and scale, predictable job success rates under heavy loads, and powerful deduplication capabilities.
Data protection architectures are, by necessity, complex in nature as they involve so many complex factors. There cannot be a “one size fits all” approach to data protection because the operational requirements of each organization dictate how data is used, and the local risk assessment process dictates to some extent how it will be protected.
An overview of December 2009 enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, Symantec’s storage management and high availability solutions.
This release enables organizations to capitalize on new storage technology – such as solid state drives (SSDs) and thin provisioning – and improving performance and scalability. In addition, near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System, allowing for fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.
This white paper describes features introduced in EMC Avamar to extend VMware vCloud Director's service delivery and Virtual Data Center capabilities to include BaaS.
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WHITE PAPER▶ Protecting VMware Environments with Backup Exec 15Symantec
Virtualization technology has been widely adopted by organizations of all sizes to optimize critical IT assets, such as data and application servers. As a result of this virtualization trend, companies are looking for efficient and effective ways to backup and recover their virtual servers and the critical applications that many of these virtual machines host, such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Active Directory.
Because virtual host servers are used by many companies to virtualize production servers, the loss of a production virtual host can cost an organization more than losing a standalone physical server, since a single virtual host can be responsible for multiple virtual servers. A lost virtual host can impact productivity for hours or days while the IT administrator struggles to recover or repair the virtualization infrastructure.
Market leaders in virtualization technology include the VMware vSphere platform and the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. Modern backup and recovery solutions designed specifically for VMware and Hyper-V environments are critical to helping organizations quickly recover in the event of a disaster, whether it occurs at the virtual host level, the virtual machine level, the application level, or the file/folder level.
A significant advantage of Backup Exec 15 in virtual environments is direct integration with the VMware virtual platform. This integration enables advanced functionality built specifically for the optimized protection of VMware environments.
Backup Exec 15 integrates with VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) to eliminate important challenges associated with the backup of VMware virtual machines and to provide faster backup performance with less overall storage consumption.
White Paper: Understanding EMC Avamar with EMC Data Protection Advisor — Appl...EMC
This white paper outlines how Data Protection Advisor helps customers gain control of their Avamar backup environments by providing a better understanding what is working well and what it not, enabling a proactive approach to managing their environments.
This White Paper describes the EMC Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution based on EMC Avamar, EMC Data Protection Advisor, and EMC HomeBase, which allows service providers to deliver backup services for cloud and traditional hosted environments, reduce storage space, increase backup speeds, and provide portal-based backup management.
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Veeam Backup & Replication is much more than backup – it provides fast, flexible, and reliable recovery of virtualized applications and data. We bring backup and replication together in a single solution to reinvent data protection and deliver the #1 VM backup for VMware vSphere and Hyper-V environments. This poster provides a high-level overview of the architecture of Veeam Backup & Replication running in a VMware environment.
Networker integration for optimal performanceMohamed Sohail
In large, modern data centers, integrating multiple products—whether from the same vendor or multiple vendors—to form a stable, consistent workflow is a major challenge. In their award-winning Knowledge Sharing article, Mohamed Sohail and Shareef Bassiouny offer some best practices for integrating NetWorker and different EMC products and present some best practices for the optimum performance of this integration.
1. WHITE PAPER
Optimized Backup and Recovery
for VMware Infrastructure with EMC Avamar
2. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................1
VMware Infrastructure Overview ...............................................................................1
VMware Consolidated Backup ..................................................................................................................................................2
EMC Avamar Overview .................................................................................................3
Solution Overview.........................................................................................................3
Backup Based on VMware Consolidated Backup ..........................................................................................................3
Guest-Based Backup........................................................................................................................................................................5
ESX Server Service Console-Based Backup ........................................................................................................................6
Appendix.........................................................................................................................8
Contents i
3. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
Introduction
VMware Infrastructure is industry’s most widely deployed virtualization solution. Virtual machines
deployed in the datacenter must be protected against failure. Extending data protection to virtual
machines is thus an important function. In the virtualized environment provided by VMware
Infrastructure, there are many ways to improve the convenience and reliability of data protection,
each with its particular advantages and challenges.
EMC Avamar is a data-protection solution for virtual infrastructure that uses unique deduplication
technology to back up virtual machines efficiently without overly taxing the infrastructure. This
paper discusses details of the Avamar solution and various ways of providing data protection.
VMware Infrastructure Overview
VMware Infrastructure is the industry’s first full infrastructure virtualization suite that allows
enterprises and small businesses alike to transform, manage, and optimize their IT infrastructure
through virtualization. VMware Infrastructure delivers comprehensive virtualization, management,
resource optimization, application availability, and operational automation capabilities in an
integrated offering.
Figure 1: VMware Infrastructure
VMware Infrastructure includes the following major components:
• VMware ESX Server — A production-proven virtualization layer run on physical servers that abstracts
processor, memory, storage, and networking resources to be provisioned to multiple virtual machines.
• VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMware VMFS) — A high-performance cluster file system for
virtual machines.
• VirtualCenter Management Server — The central point for configuring, provisioning, and managing
virtualized IT infrastructure.
Introduction 1
4. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
• Virtual Infrastructure Client (VI Client) — An interface that allows administrators and users to connect
remotely to the VirtualCenter Management Server or individual ESX Server installations from any
Windows PC.
• VMware VMotion™ — Enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server
to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity.
• VMware Consolidated Backup— Provides an easy to use, centralized facility for agent-free backup of
virtual machines. It simplifies backup administration and reduces the load on ESX Server installations.
VMware Consolidated Backup
VMware Consolidated Backup takes the backup load off the ESX Server host, eliminates the
backup window, removes backup traffic from the LAN, and eliminates the need to run backup
agents inside virtual machines to perform file-level backups of virtual machine data.
Consolidated Backup uses VMware Tools to quiesce the file system inside the virtual machine,
ensuring that when the snapshot is taken, all pending data changes have been written to disk so
the snapshot contains consistent data. Consolidated Backup also facilitates running scripts before
and after the backup, so you can freeze and quiesce applications, then unquiesce them after the
snapshot is taken.
Once the snapshot is taken, a separate physical machine — the backup proxy — mounts the base
disk as if it were a locally attached file system so a backup agent running on the proxy can read
and back up the files using the same features the agent makes available for backing up physical
drives, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: How VMware Consolidated Backup works
VMware Infrastructure Overview 2
5. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
EMC Avamar Overview
EMC Avamar software is backup and recovery software — with an important difference. Avamar’s
global data deduplication technology eliminates the unnecessary transmission over the network
and storage of redundant backup data. This deduplication slows the pace of data growth both in
core data centers and at remote offices. Avamar is especially good in areas where traditional
backup solutions struggle — virtual machines, remote offices, and large, LAN-attached file servers.
Traditional backup solutions require a rotational schedule of full and incremental backups, which
move a significant amount of redundant data week over week. Because of the unnecessary data
movement, enterprises are often faced with backup windows that roll into production hours,
network constraints, and too much storage under management. In VMware Infrastructure
environments, server consolidation can mean overlapping backup windows and heavy impact on
hardware resources.
Over the last decade, disk storage has been used to augment traditional backup approaches, but
disk solutions that are designed to replace tape libraries and media solve only a fraction of the
data protection challenges faced by enterprises.
Avamar backup software solves traditional backup challenges by reducing the size of backup data
at the source. Avamar does this using patented global data deduplication technology that stores
only a single copy of sub-file data segments across all sites and servers.
Avamar software quickly and efficiently protects VMware Infrastructure environments by reducing
the size of backup data within and across virtual machines —using agents in the virtual machines.
on the VMware Consolidated Backup server, or in the ESX Server service console. For virtual
machine backups, Avamar eliminates traditional backup bottlenecks caused by the large amount
of data that must pass through the same set of shared resources — the physical server’s CPU,
Ethernet adapter, memory, and disk storage. Avamar reduces the traditional backup load — up to
200 percent weekly — to as little as 2 percent weekly, dramatically reducing backup times and
resource utilization. Avamar also brings benefits whether an organization uses VMware
Consolidated Backup or does backups from the ESX Server service console, as outlined below.
Unlike traditional backup solutions, Avamar can deduplicate the data stored in virtual disks
(.vmdk files).
Solution Overview
Different data center environments favor different solutions. EMC Avamar in a VMware
Infrastructure environment offers you the flexibility of implementing your data protection
solution in any one of three ways:
• VMware Consolidated Backup: Avamar Agent is installed on the VCB proxy server
• Guest-based backup: Avamar Agent is installed inside the virtual machine
• Service console-based backup: Avamar Agent is installed in the service console
Backup Based on VMware Consolidated Backup
VMware Consolidated Backup enables LAN-free backup and offloads backup workload to the
Consolidated Backup proxy Server. The Consolidated Backup proxy can mount a Windows virtual
machine’s .vmdk files to provide a file system-level view of the virtual machine. Using the
Avamar Agent to back up the mounted virtual machine disks, Avamar provides data deduplication
at both the file level and the .vmdk level.
EMC Avamar Overview 3
6. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
Consolidated Backup consists of a set of utilities and scripts that work in conjunction with Avamar
Agent software and AVIM (Avamar VCB Interoperability Module). The Avamar Agent and the
Consolidated Backup interoperability module run on the Consolidated Backup proxy to provide
the backup services. Actual backup of the virtual machine happens on the backup proxy server.
One backup server can provide backup services to many ESX Server hosts as long as all the
machines share same SAN (storage area network).
The Avamar VCB Interoperability Module is a set of scripts that leverage Consolidated Backup
scripts to create snapshots and to mount and unmount the snapshots. — point-in-time copies of
the running virtual machines’ drives. When the Avamar backup server initiates a backup according
to the schedule and policy you specify, Avamar Agent on the proxy server initiates the backup
action.
As the first step in backing up the virtual machines, AVIM scripts are called before the actual
backup can happen. You can custom configure the scripts.
Figure 3: Avamar and Consolidated Backup working together
Advantages of using VMware Consolidated Backup are:
• Eliminates the need to schedule backup window downtime in order to perform nondisruptive
backups
• Makes it possible to remove backup traffic and load from the IP network by moving data over the
storage network
• Removes the processing load of backup from the ESX Server hosts
• Eliminates the need to manage backup agents in each virtual machine for most scenarios
Solution Overview 4
7. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
Avamar backup based on VMware Consolidated Backup offers you two choices when it comes to
restoring the virtual machine. You can either restore the entire virtual machine directly to the
destination ESX Server host or to the proxy server.
• Restore directly to the ESX Server host
• Requires Avamar Agent installed on the ESX Server host
• Restore to the VCB proxy
• Manually copy the virtual machine to the ESX Server host
• Run the Consolidated Backup restore command with proper options
For guests running Windows operating systems, you can restore individual files directly to the
virtual machines. This operation requires Avamar Agent inside the virtual machine. For Linux
guest, currently only image-level backup is supported.
Guest-Based Backup
Guest-level backup involves installing Avamar Agent inside each virtual machine
Backup configuration for this method is no different from that for a physical server. Usually no
scripting is needed for this type of backup. Configuration beyond basic client setup might be
needed to support a specific application, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or Microsoft
Exchange. The main advantages of this procedure are as follows:
• Highest level of data deduplication.
• Support for backup of applications inside the virtual machines
• Support for partial or file level restores
• Identical backup methods for physical and virtual machines
• No requirement for advanced scripting or VMware software knowledge
• Unchanged day-to-day procedures for backing up
Figure 4: Guest- based backup
Solution Overview 5
8. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
On the other hand, this is the most resource-intensive backup method. It also does not take advantage of
such virtual machine characteristics as encapsulation for doing efficient backups.
Restoring virtual machines in this configuration is easily accomplished. Figure 5 shows the method for
restoring a full virtual machine image.
Figure 5: Restoring an entire virtual machine
To perform a full system restore (sometimes called a bare-metal restore), the system must create a virtual
machine with operating system and Avamar Agent installed. This step is most easily achieved either by
using a template or by using a ready-made operating system image. To restore an entire file system on the
server, take the following steps:
1. Deploy a new virtual machine from a template or image.
2. Power on the virtual machine and register it with the Avamar server.
3. Perform a redirected restore to the new virtual machine.
ESX Server Service Console-Based Backup
ESX Server service console-based backup is the third option available to Avamar customers. It
involves installing Avamar Agent on the service console of each ESX Server host that needs
protection. This backup method combines the advantages of efficient management and image-
level deduplication. Using the service console-based backup method, you can choose to back up
the virtual machine either online or offline.. In either case, you start the backup on the production
ESX Server host and resources from the ESX Server host are used for moving the data to the
Avamar server.
Another option when using this method is to back up virtual machines after suspending them or
powering them off. In this case, you perform a simple backup of the .vmdk files for each virtual
machine.
The ESX Server service console-based backup method is suitable for enterprises that can afford
some downtime in the production environment.
Solution Overview 6
9. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
Figure 6: Service console-based backup
Advantages of this method of backup are:
• Less management overhead because backup agents are not needed inside the virtual machines
• No backup proxy server or SAN required because backup is done on the ESX Server host itself
• Restore goes directly to the ESX Server host
Restoring a virtual machine can be accomplished in one of two ways when you use this backup
method. Two steps are needed to restore a virtual machine: restore the .vmdk files to the ESX
Server host’s VMFS file system, then register the virtual machine with the Avamar server.
If you use manual restore without the benefit of Avamar Agent, you have the option of manually
registering the virtual machine.
7
10. VMware VMware Infrastructure Backup with Avamar
Appendix
Supported guest operating systems for Avamar are shown in the following table:
Guest Operating System Avamar Agent Revision Level
Red Hat Linux 7.3 RHEL 3 3.7.0
Red Hat Linux 8.0 RHEL 3 3.7.0
Red Hat Linux 9.0 RHEL 3 3.7.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (64-bit) RHEL 3 3.7.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (64-bit) RHEL 4 3.7.0
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 SLES 8 3.7.0
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SLES 9 3.7.0
Windows NT Windows 3.7.0
Windows 2000 Windows 3.7.0
Windows XP Windows 3.7.0
Windows Server 2003 Windows 3.7.0
Windows Server 2003 64 Windows 3.7.0
Appendix 8