Backup & Archiving Community Blog

Protecting the VMware environment has its own unique set of data protection challenges. There are basically three ways to protect VMware: the guest OS method, the console backup method and the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) method. The guest OS method treats each virtual machine as a standalone server and backups take place as usual as if the virtual is physical server. The second practice is the console backup practice, in which virtualisation administrators back up the VMware ESX Server with no regard of the underlying virtual machines in the ESX environment. (There is a “free” product, ESXi, but it has no console, and requires add-ons to manage.)

VCB Backup requires VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and initially SAN attached disk (iSCSI or Fibre Chanel) but now supports VMFS with local, JBOD, iSCSI and Fibre-Channel-attached disk, network file system (NFS) and virtual compatibility mode raw device mapping (RDM). The only mode not currently supported is physical...

First of all, I want to state that I am very impressed with the fact that Symantec is moving forward on a product that deduplicates data on either the media or client side depending on configuration. This is one of those demands that will assist all backup administrators and I.T. Departments with minimizing costs in a growing environment with miniscule backup windows. Concepts like this show the ingenuity of the developers and the technical users to perform feats against growing costs.

However, there are a few dissapointments that I have seen with Puredisk & Netbackup:

1. If you bought into the whole VTL libraries before any disk based backups were brought into play, you're screwed if you think you can move Puredisk into that environment to use. Unfortunately, you would have to break the entire VTL system (destroy its OS and applications), wipe out all the data, and set up a linux based system that would host those drives as additional disk paths....