The Five Key Attributes that Backup Software Needs to Possess to Automate and Simplify VM Data Protection
In a little over ten years server virtualization has resulted in organizations virtualizing their application servers in growing numbers. However these same organizations are still coming to grips with the emerging complexities associated with protecting and recovering their newly virtualized applications. Rectifying this requires that companies put in place software specifically tailored for virtual machine (VM) protection that automates and simplifies backup without re-introducing its costs and complexities back into the mix.
Server virtualization's penetration into organizations is undeniable. Gartner recently stated that virtualization hit 50% penetration and now refers to the virtualization market as "saturated." Gartner's estimate may even be low as other vendor specific studies have found that 80% or more of enterprises already use virtualization in some way.
These levels of adoption are changing corporate attitudes as to where server virtualization is deployed. Another survey of 250 IT professionals revealed that 68% report demand for high availability (HA) increased from 2010 to 2011 while 19% of them say that all of their production servers are now virtual. Yet even as these organizations virtualize their servers, 75% of them report increases in complexity.
These increases in complexities highlight why companies need to plan ahead and implement software that automates and simplifies all aspects of VM management.
Data protection has had a particularly rough go of it in virtualized environments. As organizations moved to virtualized environments, many brought existing methods of backup and recovery along with them with less than stellar results.
Deploying host-based backup agents on VMs caused excessive overhead and contention for resources on the physical server during peak backup times. Also, the "simple" act of installing a backup agent on a server was no longer simple as new VMs, unlike physical servers, are virtual so they were not easily seen or detected and were not always protected.
In an attempt to address these challenges, hypervisor providers such as VMware introduced APIs that detected new VMs, expedited VM backups and reduced physical server overhead. Unfortunately many legacy backup software products are not implementing these new features as quickly as many users expect or, in the cases where they are available, are priced beyond what an organization's budget allows.
This has led to an untenable situation for organizations. On one hand they have a pool of VMs that grows every day. On the other, legacy tools they use to protect VMs are slow in delivering the new data protection options they need while not doing enough to sufficiently automate, simplify and lower the cost of the protection of these VMs.
This is why more organizations are looking for an alternative solution to backup and recover their virtual environments. As they do there are five key attributes they should verify backup software possesses to ensure it automates and simplifies data protection in their virtualized environment.
vRanger is VMware certified and leverages all of the latest data protection features found in vSphere 5 to include its VADP APIs. vRanger also provides resource allocation controls to minimize the impact of one VM's backup on other production VMs running on a physical server.
Using vRanger administrators may adjust the data protection operation resource utilization and have their choice of I/O paths such as LAN-free backup if it is available. vRanger also supports the wizard-based deployments of virtual appliances (VA) instances for low-impact, centrally-controlled, and scalable VMware data protection.
With Quest backing vRanger, vRanger has moved up into protecting enterprise virtualized environments. Through its integration with NetVault SmartDisk and EMC Data Domain DD Boost, enterprises may leverage it to protect VMs by first compressing data with vRanger's native Active Block Mapping feature and then deduplicating it with these other two products.
VMs are the de facto way organizations deploy all of their applications. But to keep this highly virtualized environment as simple and easy to backup and recover as it was to implement, they now need to put the right tools in place to make this a reality.
Quest Software vRanger provides this next generation of backup and recovery software that organizations seek. Using it, organizations get the key new features they need to confidently automate, consolidate and simplify the protection of their virtualized environment without breaking the bank or the backs of their IT administrators tasked with managing it.
Server virtualization's penetration into organizations is undeniable. Gartner recently stated that virtualization hit 50% penetration and now refers to the virtualization market as "saturated." Gartner's estimate may even be low as other vendor specific studies have found that 80% or more of enterprises already use virtualization in some way.
These levels of adoption are changing corporate attitudes as to where server virtualization is deployed. Another survey of 250 IT professionals revealed that 68% report demand for high availability (HA) increased from 2010 to 2011 while 19% of them say that all of their production servers are now virtual. Yet even as these organizations virtualize their servers, 75% of them report increases in complexity.
These increases in complexities highlight why companies need to plan ahead and implement software that automates and simplifies all aspects of VM management.
Data protection has had a particularly rough go of it in virtualized environments. As organizations moved to virtualized environments, many brought existing methods of backup and recovery along with them with less than stellar results.
Deploying host-based backup agents on VMs caused excessive overhead and contention for resources on the physical server during peak backup times. Also, the "simple" act of installing a backup agent on a server was no longer simple as new VMs, unlike physical servers, are virtual so they were not easily seen or detected and were not always protected.
In an attempt to address these challenges, hypervisor providers such as VMware introduced APIs that detected new VMs, expedited VM backups and reduced physical server overhead. Unfortunately many legacy backup software products are not implementing these new features as quickly as many users expect or, in the cases where they are available, are priced beyond what an organization's budget allows.
This has led to an untenable situation for organizations. On one hand they have a pool of VMs that grows every day. On the other, legacy tools they use to protect VMs are slow in delivering the new data protection options they need while not doing enough to sufficiently automate, simplify and lower the cost of the protection of these VMs.
This is why more organizations are looking for an alternative solution to backup and recover their virtual environments. As they do there are five key attributes they should verify backup software possesses to ensure it automates and simplifies data protection in their virtualized environment.
1. Simple to Install and Configure. IT administrators are expected to manage more VMs while incorporating backup management into their day-to-day responsibilities. This puts the onus on backup software to adapt to meet this new corporate reality
As such, virtual backup software should be available as an appliance - either physical or virtual - to first simplify and accelerate its initial install. Once in place, it should auto discover both new and existing VMs and then configure them for backup based upon pre-existing policies.
To accomplish this, integration with available APIs in VMware vSphere and vCenter Server and Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) are prerequisites. VMware integration is needed for the automated discovery and management of VMs while support for Microsoft VSS is needed to ensure the creation of application consistent backups when snapshots are taken of the guest VMs.
2. VMware Certified. The rapid rates of adoption and change in virtualized environments put added demands on the backup software to properly protect it. The best way to ensure that backup software is up-to-date with the latest advancements in VM protection is to verity it is VMware certified
VMware vSphere includes the new vStorage APIs for Data Protection (referred to as VADP) that accelerates and simplifies VM protection. Due to the number of data protection challenges that exist in virtual environments, products that support and are certified with these APIs as soon as they are released should be given preference as they put organizations on a fast track to resolving their data protection challenges.
3. Application Aware. The need to create application consistent backups becomes more acute which changes the role of backup agents. These agents must facilitate readying the application so an application consistent backup may be completed on a VM during a snapshot. Advanced backup software even may quiesce applications that span multiple VMs residing more than one physical machine so a snapshot may occur across all VMs at the same time.
4. Scalable and Efficient. Backup software has to evolve so IT administrators may be more efficient in these new roles. This requires that backup software aggregate the management and reporting of backup jobs on a central console to which this single team has access. To achieve this objective, the backup software should provide a lightweight architecture that minimizes or eliminates the need for it to compete for resources on physical server while giving it the flexibility to scale efficiently with minimal or no overheard.
IT administrators also prefer to use just one backup software solution to fully and quickly protect their VMs. This requires that the virtual backup software leverage vSphere 5's full capabilities (jobs, memory, backup streams) as well as offer a catalog so VMs may be indexed and searched to accommodate eDiscovery requests.
5. Affordable. One would think that backup software providers would grasp that companies want to pay less not more for backup software to protect their VMs after just lowering their infrastructure costs. However this is not always the case so organizations need to understand how a vendor prices and license its backup software. Examine how agents, media servers and even capacity are licensed so they are not caught off-guard with unexpected costs down the road.It is as organizations look for a backup software solution that meets these five criteria that they should put Quest Software's vRanger on their short list of products for consideration. vRanger was one of the first on the market to specifically target VMware protection and today remains at the forefront of providing the highest levels of protection for VMs.
vRanger is VMware certified and leverages all of the latest data protection features found in vSphere 5 to include its VADP APIs. vRanger also provides resource allocation controls to minimize the impact of one VM's backup on other production VMs running on a physical server.
Using vRanger administrators may adjust the data protection operation resource utilization and have their choice of I/O paths such as LAN-free backup if it is available. vRanger also supports the wizard-based deployments of virtual appliances (VA) instances for low-impact, centrally-controlled, and scalable VMware data protection.
With Quest backing vRanger, vRanger has moved up into protecting enterprise virtualized environments. Through its integration with NetVault SmartDisk and EMC Data Domain DD Boost, enterprises may leverage it to protect VMs by first compressing data with vRanger's native Active Block Mapping feature and then deduplicating it with these other two products.
VMs are the de facto way organizations deploy all of their applications. But to keep this highly virtualized environment as simple and easy to backup and recover as it was to implement, they now need to put the right tools in place to make this a reality.
Quest Software vRanger provides this next generation of backup and recovery software that organizations seek. Using it, organizations get the key new features they need to confidently automate, consolidate and simplify the protection of their virtualized environment without breaking the bank or the backs of their IT administrators tasked with managing it.
Jerome- Good article, it is interesting how the introduction of virtualization has impacted data protection. We commissioned a study about a year ago on the challenges of managing virtual backups and you are definitely highlighting some of the key issues customers face.
One you mention that we see repeatedly is the issue of knowing if VMs are protected, or worse if they are double protected wasting capacity. Quest vRanger and other applications do a great job in protection, but they don't know if there are also snaps happening that are taking up capacity in the data store wasting resources. Nor can they show what the performance impact of backups are on the hosts or co-resident VMs...that's why we have partnered with Quest (and other vendors) to provide in depth reporting on these issues- thanks for highlighting the problems!
Nice post!
Though the last product in Handy Backup line (Handy Backup 7) is not VMware certified yet, the VMware plug-in has been developed and will soon be applied.