Alliance Technology Partners – Veeam, Acunetix, HP

Is Veeam the Best Backup Solution for VSphere 4?

By Archie Hendryx, 18 February, 2010 23:57

When VMware first introduced VCB as part of the ESX package, it never did seem more than a temporary / complimentary solution for customers who had a small environment of 100 VMs or less. With the launch of VSphere4 and the subsequent introduction of APIs which allowed external applications and scripts to communicate directly to the ESX, it was apparent that VMware was beginning the gradual move to offload the backup solution to the Backup experts. Now having run with VSphere4 for more than six months, it seems a good time to assess and evaluate who has taken advantage and the lead with incorporating all the latest features of ESX4.

To recap; with VMs being encapsulated in a single disk file the principal was that image-level backups instead of traditional file-level allowed backups to be much faster. With VSphere4, VMware introduced improved support for thin provisioning which not only had the potential to reduce the amount of actual storage allocated but also shorten backup windows. The idea was straightforward; by using thin provisioning the system admin is given the ability to over-commit disk space, especially handy as the majority of VMs don’t use all of their allocated disk space. Thus this eradicates the problem with the majority of disk-to-disk backup applications using image-level backups i.e. no more backing up of a complete virtual disk file of a VM when most of it wasn’t actually used.

Another new addition to VSphere4 and it’s vStorage APIs was the feature of CBT (Changed Block Tracking). With CBT the VMkernel could now track the changed blocks of a VM’s virtual disk. Just by querying the information using an API call to the VMkernel, CBT alleviates the burden from the backup applications having to scan or keep track of changed blocks. This results in much quicker incremental backups as the overhead of scanning the whole VM image for changes since the last backup could now be eradicated.

So in looking around for solutions which best incorporated these new features I eventually came across Veeam. Utilising the thin provisioning feature to remove the overhead of no longer seeking out empty disk blocks and the unnecessary backing up of those empty blocks, Veeam also incorporates compression algorithms on the target backup device. Hence Veeam have a solution that not only reduces the amount of space used on the source host datastores but also the target backup storage device.

Furthermore Veeam is currently the only third party API that offer support for CBT, although ESXpress are promising something similar with their upcoming version 4. Veeam have come up with several different modes to utilise the CBT feature namely, SAN mode, Virtual Appliance mode and Network mode. Each mode brings less I/O to each device depending on your setup and thus less resource consumption when performing backups consequently leading to reduced backup windows.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/the-sanman-10014929/is-veeam-the-best-back-up-solution-for-vsphere-4-10015149/

Get More Information about Veeam Backup and Replication (Surebackup)

Get more information about Veeam Software

Veeam has developed patent-pending technology that will allow you to verify the recoverability of every backup—for every virtual machine (VM), every time. It’s the latest innovation in our SureBackup™ approach to data protection. So instead of just hoping that you can recover from a backup, you’ll actually know that you can—because you already did so as a routine part of the backup process.

The Veeam Backup and Replication software will automatically test the backup for you by directly mounting the compressed backup file, to an ESX host and verifying the backup.  So now you can test every backup instead of test a couple a week.

For More information on Veeam Surebackup (Backup and Replication), Veeam Monitor, Veeam Management Suite, or other Veeam Products go to www.alliancetechpartners.com.  Alliance Technology Partners is a National Veeam Gold Pro Partner based in St. Lous, MO.

Veeam SureBackup Posted By Texiwill on March 23, 2010

Veeam has introduced a new technology named SureBackup. SureBackup is designed to not only use Veeam’s Backup technology to backup your virtual machines (VMs) but will also test the restoration of each of these VMs to ensure that they at least boot and at most the applications involved are actually running within the VM. This is a great improvement over current backup methodologies which consists of by hand testing of only a scant number of virtual machines to ensure restorations result in boot-able virtual machines. The full test of restorability almost always happens during a disaster situation when everyone is under a fair amount of pressure. The current backup and restoration testing follows this path: •Quiesce the virtual disk employing VSS or other technologies •Backup the virtual disk•Copy the virtual disk to offline storage (tape, blu-ray, dvd, hot-site, remote disk array, etc.) •Choose some of the VMs for by hand restoration (perhaps rotating through all VMs eventually) •Restore chosen VMs into a testing pool (by hand) •Verify that the chosen VMs boot (by hand) •Verify that the chosen VMs applications work (by hand) What is interesting is that the last 3 steps often do not happen and per backup schedule do not test ALL the virtual machines, instead a select number of them. However, this situation now changes. These last three steps may also have an additional license cost if running Microsoft Windows operating systems as the Microsoft EULA is based on running instance of the operating system which includes any restoration testing performed by hand or process. Introducing Veeam SureBackup Veeam Surebackup takes those last three steps and automates them so that every VMs restoration is tested. How much testing depends entirely on how SureBackup is configured. You can easily test to ensure all VMs restore and boot out of the box. You can also verify the integrity of certain applications out of the box. You can also add your own scripts to SureBackup to test other non-standard applications as well. Since this is an automated task, human error is no longer an issue, the process is repeatable, and best yet, all VMs are tested to ensure restoration happens properly before you need it, preventing issues during the high pressured disaster recovery situation. Veeam SureBackup can restore VMs on local systems, hot-site systems, or dedicated systems. VMs are restored into private virtual networks within specific resource pools so that your systems can be configured to lower the overall impact of restoration testing. Backups take quite a while when you have 1000s of VMs, so incrementatl backups and Change Block Tracking is available to reduce this time. Backup takes quite a bit of disk space so data and disk de-duplication can be used. Restoration testing takes personal and system resources to complete, now SureBackup can alleviate much of these resource utilizations but not licensing issues.

For More Information about Veeam Backup and Replication or to Buy Veeam.  Go to www.alliancetechpartners.com