Rapid Backup and Recovery for Virtual Environments

By NetworkWorldAsia Staff | May 14, 2008

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IT and data center managers are starting to envision the benefits of virtual environments.  The widespread interest in virtualization today has companies intent on cashing in on the advantages of virtualization technologies eager to reduce the financial and physical footprint associated with racks of computers.

While many elements of the IT environment are relatively unchanged by virtualization, there are some new considerations for IT.  For example, organizations with expanding virtual infrastructures should plan to protect their virtual resources with a strategy similar to the one they use for physical resources. Challenged with meeting recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), even as backup windows and storage space shrink, organizations must be able to quickly back up their virtual environments and recover not just an entire virtual machine but individual files on that machine.

To that end, a growing number of companies are opting for advanced technologies that address new virtual environments.  Organizations need an efficient and flexible approach to protecting virtual environments that dramatically reduces server, network, and storage requirements for data protection while providing significant improvement in recovery time and reliability.

Better Backups, Better Recovery
With off-host backups of virtual machines now possible, the impact of backup processing on the server and hosted virtual machines is significantly reduced. This allows for more frequent backups.

Yet, traditional backup solutions force users to choose image or file and don’t provide the capability to back up the entire virtual machine without conducting two separate backups.   Recognizing the benefits of being able to perform either type of restore, organizations prefer to have ultimate restore options when things go wrong.

For example, if a virtual machine is infected with a virus or inadvertently damaged due to user error, a single file restore is of little use; the entire virtual machine needs to be restored.  However, if the user deletes and needs to recover a single file—the most common type of restore operation—restoring the entire virtual machine is not only excessive but also requires downtime.

At the same time, aggressive RPOs and RTOs remain a requirement for keeping mission-critical applications constantly available. Meeting those objectives requires tight integration of the backup and recovery process with the applications and databases they are protecting, whether in physical or virtual environments. It also requires granular recovery to improve recovery time, instant recovery options from online images, and complete system recoveries of operating environment, application, and data in minutes.

Consequently, new backup and recovery tools are making possible either type of restore while retaining the performance advantages of an off-host backup and a single backup pass. At the foundation of these capabilities is technology that backs up the entire virtual machine and then maps, catalogs, and backs up individual files as well.

Particularly useful for larger virtual installations based on shared storage, the integration of this backup technology with the virtual server technology enables organizations to manipulate virtual snapshots just as they would array or software-based snapshots. Snapshots of virtual machines are created and then mounted to the backup proxy for backup. This approach almost completely removes the backup processing overhead from the server that contains the virtual machines and allows for rapid backup of virtual machines.

What’s more, when such backup capabilities are combined with deduplication, additional benefits emerge. By deduplicating backup data prior to transmission, the processor, network, and storage resources required for the backup process are reduced by one or more orders of magnitude, according to some studies. This comprehensive approach enables fast, low-impact virtual infrastructure backups with dramatically reduced backup windows and recovery times. It also makes virtual machine backup feasible for lower-scale virtual deployments that do not employ SAN technologies

Integration and Automation
It is no surprise that backup technologies with tighter integration with virtual technologies offer additional benefits to organizations. For example, the integration of a snapshot wizard with the virtual server infrastructure can ease backup policy configuration. Also, the direct integration of a configuration wizard with the virtual infrastructure can help ensure that IT administrators have a straightforward and easy-to-use graphical interface from which to configure and manage their virtual machines. With such a GUI, administrators can quickly provide login credentials, define other types of virtual servers, and more.

A number of tools also provide for automatic discovery of virtual machines. This capability is often offered as part of the backup policy to make it easier for administrators to select specific or all virtual machines associated with an enterprise-level virtualization technology.

Virtual Evolution
Virtualization not only provides redundancy for mission-critical applications and data, but it is also effective as a tool that enables IT to extend limited resources within overcrowded computing environments. Its use will likely continue, even as a growing number of organizations deploy virtualization not simply in test or development environments but in production environments as well. Indeed, many enterprises have virtual servers running both business and production applications today. Furthermore, enterprises that deploy virtualization are recognizing that it is not a one-time ROI-based project but an ongoing strategy for operational efficiency.

As the adoption of virtual technologies increases, businesses must take a critical look at the tools and technologies for backing up and restoring these virtual machines and their data. While traditional approaches to backup and recovery in the physical world do not translate well in virtual infrastructures, many of the requirements remain the same. Organizations must be able to continue to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations through the use of virtual technologies while also delivering on strict RTOs and RPOs.

Consequently, a growing number of enterprises are leveraging innovative backup and recovery technologies that deliver granular file-level and image-level recovery from a single backup operation. When used together with data deduplication and tight integration of backup technologies with virtual technologies, these tools enable fast, low-impact virtual backups that dramatically reduce the challenges of data protection while offering measurable improvements in reliability as well as recovery time.

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