VMware Backup Best Practices

Legacy backup tools (like physical server backup) are now obsolete and don’t work well for VM environments. Legacy backup tools were not built for VM environments. It’s one thing to restore your physical servers and file and folder data, but if a virtual machine fails, the recovery process will be different. That is where Dell AppAssure’s VMware backup software comes into play. Dell AppAssure experience with the VM environment is to perform VM backup at the image level. Your virtual backup product must also be integrated with VMware vStorage API. It should offer ability to perform instant recovery of your VM applications and data as well as allowing you to ensure that any backup created is recoverable.

Here are key best practices functions that should be built into your next VMware backup and recovery scheme:

Choose a tool that:

Carries out block-level backups. A VMware backup is conducted most efficiently when the first full backup is followed by incremental-always backups with changed block tracking.
Employs a virtualization management tool to recover virtual machines automatically, working through the hypervisor or a centralized management tool employing VMware API calls.

Use snapshots for upgrades, backups to prevent data loss
It’s inefficient to use snapshots as your prime recovery mechanism because storing 100s of snapshots per server is a terribly inefficient use of disk space. Use the snapshots for long-term data storage sparingly, primarily for upgrades or changes to a critical VM, and depend on a VMware backup – which can be compressed and deduplicated – to achieve more disk-efficient data protection.

Increase production machine performance with Smart Agents™
Agentless technology is heavily promoted as being more efficient, but recent tests show that the two minutes saved one time by not having to install an agent on each VM is negated by permanent performance drops of between 60% and 80% on the host CPU over the time of each backup. When CPU performance drops, every virtual machine on the host slows down by the same percentage, causing potentially serious productivity problems. Smart Agent™ technology is a best practice alternative for two reasons:

It installs on each virtual machine automatically, so the negative administrative burden once ascribed to it is essentially non-existent.
It eliminates agentless’ permanent impact on host CPU performance.
No agents to license – priced per socket
No agents to monitor

Instant Restore of VMs for Near-Zero RTO

No reason to wait for a complete system restore before you can begin to use a VMware machine
Live Recovery™ technology allows you to recover a VMware machine in minutes
Data loads seamlessly in the background.
If a user ‘touches’ data that has not yet been restored, Dell AppAssure restores it first

Install VMware Tools virtual drivers in each virtual machine
Installing VMware Tools in each VM improves each machine’s performance and gets the data in and out of the VM as efficiently as possible.

Test restores, not just backups
Few administrators have time to check every backup made for recoverability. Dell AppAssure has addressed this with the introduction of automated recoverability testing of application integrity. This guarantees administrator will be able recover not just the server, but also the OS and the applications inside it.

Use Deduplication and Compression
Virtual machine snapshots and virtual machine clones contribute to up to 80% identical OS’s on VM machine populations, and they contribute to data duplication. Dell AppAssure integrates deduplication in a VMware backup with file compression to keep network traffic flowing quickly and reduce disk storage spending.

Be Application Aware
Dell AppAssure builds application awareness into to practically every IT environment to fully protect Microsoft Exchange Servers and the many applications that embed SQL database technology without necessarily identifying it. Having application-aware backups is now a fundamental best practice requirement for achieving full application recoveries.

Plan for Offsite Storage and Replication
If a local host is destroyed by fire or flood, the game is over if you don’t also have offsite recovery capability. But amazingly, some popular virtualization tools don’t support offsite backup or replication, leaving organizations vulnerable to crippling data loss. Current best practice calls for the ability to back up or replicate to an offsite location (this can include cloud services) and the option to recover from it or in it.