VMware jumps forward in backup

Backup is often complex and laborious work – one of the biggest pains in IT. It is not a glamorous activity because it does not deliver any improvement to businesses' top lines and is, indeed, an expense that reduces the bottom line. Even when it does its job by averting disaster, it simply maintains the status quo. However, it is essential.

The basic management considerations for backup are the same in the physical and virtual worlds. Server virtualisation in itself does not complicate backup, but its sizeable benefit of hardware consolidation makes life harder for backup administrators. Alongside this, virtual server sprawl increases backup workload because it creates many more servers to administer. These two issues exist regardless of the virtualisation platform and, arguably, virtualisation has turned back the clock for backup. Vendors are still working to put this situation right with architectural changes to backup systems.

In 2007, VMware eased backup problems for its customers by launching its free VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework. However, VCB was not ideal, as it required customers to install more complicated backup systems for their virtual servers than for their physical servers.

This year VMware launched a successor to VCB called vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP). VADP is a major step forward, enthusiastically endorsed by third-party suppliers of backup software. It will be a significant competitive advantage for VMware and benefit the company's customers, because it will greatly simplify backup of their virtual servers.

• Executive summary
• Recommendations
• Backup issues are common to both sides of the virtual looking glass
• Automation is king
• Policy-based is the best policy
• Recovery is the better part of backup
• Backup issues are unique to the virtual world
• Where have all the cycles gone?
• Sprawling servers gum up the works
• Sleeping virtual servers slip the net
• Defining backup service levels
• Recovery time objective
• Recovery point objective
• Continuous data protection
• Granularity
• Some backups are worthless
• Crash consistency
• File consistency
• Application consistency
• De-duplication is just as useful in the virtual world
• De-duplication and backup are tied at the hip
• Target de-duplication requires no change for virtual servers
• De-dupe at the source
• Sticking with traditional backup architectures
• Keeping the backup story simple
• Placing an agent in every virtual server
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• Placing an agent in every host
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• Happy snapping in the SAN or NAS pool
• Using the tools in disk arrays
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• VCB – VMware's first helping hand
• Offloading the hosts
• How it works
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• VCB is updated transparently
• Evolution and a new name
• A slew of good things
• What changed?
• Living with a background load
• Backup vendors back VADP quickly
• Don't confuse VADP with the VMware Data Recovery tool