Backup and recovery needs for businesses vary. If it’s a virtual environment that your business depends on, how do needs regarding backup and recovery change? If you use virtualization how do you manage data workloads? While there’s no escaping the fact that efficient and effective backups are important for businesses, virtual environments present significant challenges.
Conventional backup methods are fine but when they are applied to virtual environments, they create new problems. They also place huge loads on physical hardware and other resources you might use. Virtualization does give us the benefit of physical hardware abstraction and helps you do more from the resources you already have. Processor compatibility, synchronization between production and disaster recovery to ensure virtual machines work, as they should.
So, what are the various approaches available for backup and recovery for virtual environments? Let’s explore:
The Simple, Shut down Method
One simple way to backup virtualized networks is to shut down individual machines, suspend virtual machines and make copies of files. Otherwise known as “offline backup”, it’s an easy way to backup your data. This approach also presents a full system image that you may use for disaster recovery while providing you some granularity (use the image to recover individual files). As you can see, systems have to be shut down for this approach to work. For a large business, it could mean downtime (which is expensive).
Agent-based Backup
Virtual machines are hosted on a physical host. Each of these virtual machines runs a file-level and application specific backup agent (just as traditional or physical servers do). This method provides you with a much more granular control than the shut down method and is a great way to maintain effective, application centric virtual machine backups. The way agent-based backup works is similar to how email inbox systems work (like Microsoft’s Outlook or Exchange mailbox). The only issue with agent-based backups is the fact that agents use up a lot of processor power and I/O resources when more than one virtual machine hosted off a single hardware resource.
Server-less Back up
This solution entails using a backup proxy server (which in turn runs a backup proxy agent). The backup proxy server takes system images or snapshots. Since backup proxy server host controls the backup workloads, the virtual machines do not bear the load and hence hypervisor resources are spared during backup. This image-based backup using a proxy server stores the state of the server almost as if the main server just crashed. A dedicated LUN is used with integrated virtual machines to ensure application-consistent snapshots.
Consolidated Backup
If your network needs to backup servers centrally, a consolidated backup procedure is your best bet. VMWare Consolidated Backup, for instance, ensures that virtual machines are quiesced before snapshots are taken by a backup proxy server to produce consistent, application-specific images. Some vendors build systems along with the consolidated backup approach to reduce processor loads on hardware resources, recognize and locate virtual machines, data de-duplication, control virtual machine sprawl, and to allow active backups.
If you’d like us to help you with planned data backups or if you have any questions regarding effective data backups and recovery, please give us a call and we’ll be glad to help you out.