Backup Strategies for Integrity Virtual Machines

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Table Of Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 2

Basic Aspects of Data Protection for Virtual Environments .......................................................... 2

Backup and Recovery from the VM Host System ................................................................... 3

Backup and Recovery of Individual Virtual Machines ............................................................. 3

Protecting the Virtual Environment Configuration ................................................................... 4

Data Protection Scenarios for Virtual Machines ........................................................................ 5

Network Backup and Recovery .......................................................................................... 5

Statically Attached Device Backup and Recovery .................................................................. 6

Dynamically Attached Device Backup and Recovery ............................................................. 7

Volume Splitting on the VM Host ........................................................................................ 9

Consolidated Virtual System Backup from VM Host ............................................................. 10

Disaster Recovery, Ignite-UX, and Integrity Virtual Machines .................................................... 10

General Guidelines and Suggestions .................................................................................... 11

Storage Configuration for Reliability ................................................................................. 11

Plan for Recovery of the Virtual Environment ....................................................................... 11

Best Practices for Using EBS on Integrity Virtual Machines .................................................... 11

Configuration Tips for Backup and Recovery Software ..................................................... 11

Summary ................................................................................................................... 12

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 12

For more information ......................................................................................................... 12

General information online ........................................................................................... 12

Documentation and white papers .................................................................................. 12

Summary of content (12 pages)

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Backup Strategies for Integrity Virtual Machines Introduction........................................................................................................................2 Basic Aspects of Data Protection for Virtual Environments..........................................................2 Backup and Recovery from the VM Host System...................................................................3 Backup and Recovery of Individual Virtual Machines.................................................
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Introduction Data protection – arguably the most important aspect of data center management – applies to any system whether it is physical, partitioned, or virtual. The architecture of HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM) enables multiple approaches to data protection for virtual machines, providing the flexibility to apply existing backup and recovery solutions to your virtual environment.
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Figure 1 Generalization of Integrity Virtual Machines architecture. Backup and Recovery from the VM Host System Keeping in mind that a virtual machine’s storage can be accessed from the VM Host system, one can imagine that backups run on the VM Host can also effectively backup storage on the virtual machines. This is true because the virtual machine’s storage must be accessible by the VM Host system.
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Figure 2 Two basic paradigms for backing up an Integrity VM environment are: 1) backup and recovery at VM Host level (shown on the left), and 2) backup and recovery of individual virtual machines (shown on the right). Protecting the Virtual Environment Configuration Be sure to include the VM Host system’s data, independent of the storage used by the virtual machines themselves as their virtual disks, in your data protection strategy.
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Data Protection Scenarios for Virtual Machines The recent releases, 3.0 and 3.5, of Integrity Virtual Machines delivered new functionality in areas that directly benefit data protection strategies for virtual systems, including: • Attached I/O device support for tape drives, media changers, and optical media burners, • Online add and delete capability for virtual storage devices, • Accelerated Virtual I/O devices, • Boot-from-tape capability.
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Statically Attached Device Backup and Recovery Having a virtual machine serve as the backup server is, in a sense, a variation on the network B&R strategy. You may configure such a scenario so that only a single VM need an attached device connection while not requiring a physical network adapter. With such a configuration, the backup and restore traffic is isolated from the public LANs – both virtual and physical – in that environment.
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Dynamically Attached Device Backup and Recovery By taking advantage of the online add and delete capabilities of Integrity VM attached devices, you can avoid network connections for B&R altogether. While attached devices cannot be shared amongst virtual machines simultaneously, they can be accessed exclusively by individual virtual machines without having to restart them.
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Volume Splitting Inside the Virtual System Another popular approach to data protection is the notion of volume splitting which draws on data redundancy capabilities to take snapshots of data storage volumes at a given point in time. After the split occurs, the volume management software typically tracks the changes made to the volumes so that, subsequently, the volumes are merged back together.
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Volume Splitting on the VM Host Let us now explore virtual system data protection through the VM Host. You can protect the virtual system’s data can be protected in a similar fashion by taking the volume-splitting concept down to the VM Host level. The major difference between this approach and splitting volumes inside the virtual system relates to the application using that data. As illustrated in Figure 7, only one virtual disk may correspond to a volume on the VM Host system.
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Consolidated Virtual System Backup from VM Host You can simplify your backup approach by consolidating all of your virtual system backups by using the VM Host system as a single client for data protection purposes. To do so, you must make sure that the virtual systems have completed all of their I/O transactions by either disconnecting their virtual disks or by shutting down the virtual machine and its operating system.
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General Guidelines and Suggestions Based on the scenarios presented here and some practical experience, there are some data protection guidelines and pitfalls in a virtual environment you should be aware of. Storage Configuration for Reliability In several figures above a subtle but important storage configuration detail is illustrated – whenever mirroring inside the guest, take care that the virtual disks in that mirror map to storage entities on separate physical storage devices.
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Summary Data protection activities such as backups and restores will execute quickly and efficiently by practicing the following: • Configuring the virtual NIC used for backups to use the AVIO network adapter, • Using the AVIO storage adapter wherever possible when configuring virtual disk storage, and • Enabling multiple, concurrent streams in the virtual system’s backup configuration. Always check the support matrix provided by the EBS vendor for support of your environment.