White Papers

DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | September 200946
FEATURE SECTION:
STORAGE EFFICIENCY
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, September 2009. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
A
s virtualization continues to sweep through
the enterprise—helping to consolidate server
workloads and increase resource utilization
throughout data centers, remote offices, and recovery
sites—administrators are struggling to adjust legacy
backup methods to this flexible, ever-changing infra-
structure. Backup tools designed to protect traditional
physical servers can introduce a variety of problems
and limitations when deployed in virtualized environ-
ments, including taxing server processing resources,
stretching networks and storage capacity to their
limits, and slowing recovery times.
CommVault Simpana software, included in the Dell
™
PowerVault
™
DL2000 – Powered by CommVault, offers
next-generation data protection designed specifically
for VMware® and Microsoft® virtualization platforms to
help overcome these challenges. This article outlines
how following best practices for protecting VMware
virtual machines (VMs) and taking advantage of key
Simpana features such as incremental VM backup capa-
bilities can help administrators streamline their backup
processes, reduce storage requirements, and support
rapid recovery of both individual files and entire VMs.
DESIGNING FOR VIRTUALIZED
ENVIRONMENTS
Implementing data protection strategies in VMware envi-
ronments presents a number of common challenges:
VM sprawl:
■■
As VMs proliferate—often without the
knowledge of data protection administrators—it
becomes increasingly difficult to manage and
apply consistent data protection services based
on organizational needs.
Infrastructure overload from concurrent backup
■■
processing: Not only can traditional backup agents
be cumbersome to implement and maintain inside
VMs, but the resulting concurrent backup opera-
tions can overwhelm host servers.
Balance between disaster recovery and granular
■■
recovery needs: VMware Consolidated Backup
(VCB) supports two distinct methods for backing
up VMs: image level and file level. In large environ-
ments, however, having multiple policies for every
VM can complicate management and increase
backup media consumption.
Retention on and recovery from disk target:
■■
Typical approaches to VM backup utilize the VCB
image-level method to create full backups every
day, resulting in an excessive volume of data trans-
fer. The lack of incremental backup capability—a
feature that is generally taken for granted for physi-
cal servers—can cause massive scalability prob-
lems. In backup-to-disk (B2D) configurations, the
disk target can be exhausted rapidly, forcing back-
ups to move to secondary and slower storage tiers.
This in turn reduces the ability to perform fast
Using traditional backup methods in virtualized
environments can quickly stretch processing, storage,
and networking resources to their limits. CommVault®
Simpana® software oers next-generation data
protection designed specifically for virtualization,
helping streamline backup processes, reduce storage
requirements, and support rapid data recovery.
By Brian Brockway
Zahid Ilkal
Streamlining Data
Protection in Vmware
enVironmentS USing
commVaUlt SimPana