VM /ETC

A critical piece of the migration to virtual infrastructure is the consideration of how to backup the new virtual machines and the data they contain. Although switching to a full VM backup strategy is desirable, the reality of the required tape or disk media needed to support the large backup file sizes causes companies to continue to use the existing physical environment’s agent based backup.

However, Vizioncore and Datadomain offer a feasible backup solution using commonly available IP based storage that should make IT departments with even the tightest budgets look twice. Combining deduplication with LAN based VM backups to CIFS shares or NFS mounts, this solution provides a cost effective transition to full VM backups with minimal storage space consumed. Datadomain and Vizioncore established a certified partnership for VMware infrastructure in September of 2007 and therefore provide established solutions with technologies proven to work well together.

The image to the right was taken from Vizioncore’s solution .pdf titled Cost Efective Backup & Recovery & Storage for Virtualized Environments with Vizioncore Solutions and Data Domain Deduplication Appliances. The .pdf provides an overview of the design as well as recommendations for ensuring performance. This diagram illustrates a solution for not only VMs but also physical servers backed up as VMs by vRanger Pro’s P2V-DR feature.

To provide more specifics about this solution’s possibilities

I’ll refer to another great blog post on this topic.

Carlo Costanzo illustrates 3 design options for live virtual machine backups using vRanger Pro and CIFS or NFS datastores in his vmwareinfo.com post Backing up Virtual Machines using Vizioncore’s vRanger to a Data Domain.
Carlo does a great job providing the pros and cons for each option. I’ve trimmed Carlo’s original content a little for this section, but be sure to follow the link above for the post in it’s entirety.

NFS Export

Using Data Domain’s ability to create an NFS mount, you can configure the ESX hosts to use the Data Domain as a DataStore. This will allow the VizionCore vRanger machine to direct the individual ESX hosts to backup the VMs over a vKernel port group to the Data Domain server.

Pros:

1. The NFS export will be available to ALL ESX hosts so multiple ESX hosts could transmit backup traffic simultaneously increasing throughput and shortening the backup window.
2. Full backups would be taken each night which would make restores a little easier.
3. Vizioncore server could be virtualized since it would only manage and NOT PASS traffic.

Cons:

1. Virtual Machine backup traffic from the vKernel to the Data Domain will be transmitted over TCP connections.
2. NFS does not support incremental backups which mean that every night full backups would have to be transmitted over TCP to the Data Domain possibly increasing backup window times.

CIFS Share

Using Data Domain’s ability to create an CIFS mount, you can configure the Vizioncore vRanger Server to use the Data Domain as a Windows Share. This will allow the Vizioncore vRanger Server to directly backup the Virtual Machines over TCP to the Data Domain Server.

Pros:

1. Windows CIFS mounts are the only destination supported by vRanger for incremental backups. This will allow for much smaller backup windows.
2. Vizioncore vRanger server could be virtualized.

Cons:

1. vRanger server could prove to be a bottleneck in throughput and lengthen backup windows.
2. Backup traffic would be transmitted from the ESX server and to the Data Domain server over TCP connections.

VCB proxy with NFS Mount

A physical VCB proxy server with vRanger installed could be fiber connected into the SAN fabric allowing VCB/vRanger to perform LAN free backups from the SAN to a local NFS mount provided by the Data Domain device.

Pros:

1. The physical VCB server could perform incremental backups over the Fiber directly shortening backup times.
2. The NFS export could be mounted through the VCB Windows server supporting incremental backups.
3. The Backup Proxy would shoulder the processing load of the backups allowing the backup window to possibly extend into work hours.

Cons:

1. vRanger / VCB proxy would need to be a physical server connected via fiber into the fabric.

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