I have been doing a lot of research into VMWare backups recently, and it’s fair to say there are many different options, too many to name them all really, as ever there isn’t a single solution I have found that can do it all, so which it right for you will really depend on your specific requirements.
I watched a really interesting webinar on Backup Central last week on this topic you can find here http://bit.ly/uLjMcp . It talks about traditional / Enterprise backup products (E.g. Symantec Backup Exec & NetBackup, ComVault, NetVault Backup etc.) Vs. Custom VMWare backup products (Veeam, vRanger are the main contenders here) and lays out fairly clearly the benefits and drawbacks of each.
To summarise, and I’m generalising a bit here, VMWare specific products like Veeam and vRanger have been built from the ground up specifically for VMWare environments. vRanger and Veeam both backup at a host level, so you don’t need to install agents within the VM’s, which can lead to IO problems in large VMWare installs and be difficult to manage, and still allow for recovery of individual files, this is clearly a more efficient way to do VMWare backups than running an agent in every VM you are backing up. They also have some great features that currently (as far as I am aware) none of the major traditional packages have been able to replicate – for example in Veeam (and vRanger?) you can boot a VM machine directly from a deduplicated backup store for quicker recovery – admittedly I am not sure how well it would run having never tested it, but a neat feature none the less. As ever, despite these advantages, there are some drawbacks – currently both Veeam and vRanger can only backup virtual servers, so if you have any physical servers running, you will need a second solution to back these up. You can’t backup to tape with either of the products yet (although I believe vRanger are releasing this next year) and for applications that are not VSS friendly, backing up at the host level can cause problems as the applications don’t know they have been backed up, so won’t truncate logs etc.
Traditional / enterprise backup products were originally designed to backup physical boxes, with agents installed on each box to back up specific OS’s and applications, and have had to adapt rapidly to compete with the new VMWare specific backup products mentioned above. I am not too familiar with Symantec or ComVault, but know NetVault fairly well, so for the purposes of comparison I will refer to NetVault. They have responded by developing a plugin for VMWare that integrates with the VMWare API’s to backup at a host level, just as vRanger and Veeam do, I assume that most traditional products if they haven’t already, will release something similar. It’s not quite as feature rich as Veeam or vRanger, but does a pretty good job – can restore individual files (from Window’s Guest OSes) or whole VM's, but can’t run VM’s directly from the backup store. The big advantage they have is that with one solution, you can backup all of your physical and virtual servers, you can backup to tape, and they have plugins for applications that don’t integrate with VSS so you can perform guest level backups as needed to back up these.
In reading various forums and speaking with some of our clients, it seems that at present, there are many companies using a combination of Enterprise and Custom VMWare backup products. One of our clients for example is using Veeam to backup thier VMWare infrastructure to disk, and NetVault to push these backups onto tape, and to backup a few physical servers they are running. If you already have the licences to a traditional product to backup your physical servers and handle backups to tape, then this is a good way to go if budget it a factor, but it can be more difficult to setup, manage and monitor.
No comments:
Post a Comment