Backup Strategies for Integrity Virtual Machines

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.
By leveraging these capabilities, you have many choices for protecting data used by virtual
systems. In the following sections, you will find several scenarios including general configuration
examples and approaches. These scenarios serve as examples and are not an exhaustive list but
rather a summary of practices that you can modify as necessary to fit into your overall data center
protection practices.
Network Backup and Recovery
You can achieve virtual system data protection via network connection with a disk agent in the virtual
system connecting to a separate system where the media agent resides. The virtual systems do not
need a direct connection to an attached device (e.g., tape drive), nor does it require media agents in
the virtual systems. Figure 3 shows the media agent residing on a physical system connected to a
storage system, but this system could also be a virtual machine with an attached device connection as
outlined in Figure 4.
Figure 3 Network backup and recovery for virtual machines