Why virtual machine backups are different by David Davis, Backup Academy

Why Virtual Machine Backups Are Different

David Davis

Twitter: @davidmdavisBlog: www.VMwareVideos.com

About the speaker

Previous VMware Customer, IT Manager, Server & Network Admin with 18 years in IT

Contributor to industry publications

Agenda

Hardware Independence

Image Level vs. File Level Backups

Change Block Tracking (CBT)

New Possibilities With VM Backups – Fast Restore, Replication, Virtual Lab, and more

Traditional Backup Doesn’t Understand Virtualization

What is the Right Tool for the Job?

Hardware Independence

Totally different approach required for virtualization

Traditional architecture

Hardware Independence

Virtualization architecture

Hardware Independence

Abstracts OS from being tied to the hardware Guest OS now uses virtual hardware that works no

matter the underlying server hardware Allows you to move VMs from server to server (within

processor family) Hardware independence makes the benefits of

virtualization possible

Completely changes how you should look at backup

Image Level vs. File Level Backups

With virtualization, you can backup the entire “image” of the server

No agent is required in the guest OS

No load is put on the guest OS

No end users are affected when the backup occurs

Backing up the image of the server is much faster and less disruptive than backing up the files in the guest OS

Image level restores are much faster

Restore

Backup

Restore options and speed are critical

Change Block Tracking (CBT)

With VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0 or later and virtual machine HW version 7 or later, change block tracking is possible

Virtual machine disk blocks that are changed are tracked outside of the guest OS

CBT allows virtualization backup software to backup only the changed blocks (software that takes advantage of this feature)

Allows backups to only process changed blocks

New Possibilities with VM Backups

VM portability (HW independence) vMotion / svMotion / DRS / VMHA Fast backup (change block tracking) Fast restore (mount for backup repository & image

level restore) Simplified disaster recovery Replication of only changed blocks to DR site Virtual Lab using backups of production VMs for

test & development

All made possible with use of virtualization

Traditional Backup Doesn’tUnderstand Virtualization

You need backups of the VMDK (virtual machine disk) as well as the VMX (virtual machine configuration)

Traditional Backup Doesn’tUnderstand Virtualization

The VMX contains the VM’s virtual hardware and configuration

Traditional Backup Doesn’tUnderstand Virtualization

Virtual machines move around thanks to vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

What is the Right Tool for the Job?

What We Covered

Hardware Independence

Image Level vs. File Level Backups

Change Block Tracking (CBT)

New Possibilities With VM Backups – Fast Restore, Replication, Virtual Lab, and more

Traditional Backup Doesn’t Understand Virtualization

What is the Right Tool for the Job?

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