Most enterprise environments today are running at least some part of their core infrastructure in virtual machines. Virtual machines have revolutionized the way hardware is utilized and have also increased the efficiency of that utilization. It has also enabled organizations to build out highly available platforms that would be much more difficult to accomplish if physical servers are used. VMware is the industry leader in today’s enterprise virtualization technology and is utilized by a large number of enterprise data centers. While VMware provides native high availability and other great features and functionalities, you still need to have a data protection solution for backing up VMware virtual machines. Let’s take a look at VMware virtual machines backup checklist. What are the important factors to consider when architecting a backup strategy for VMware virtual machines?
Important Considerations for VMware Virtual Machine Backups
There are a number of considerations to be made when thinking about backing up VMware virtual machines. Let’s consider the following checklist in looking at backing up VMware virtual machines:
- Backup virtual machines at the host level
- Take Image-level backups
- Use Changed Block Tracking
- Make sure VMware Tools are installed
- Use Application-aware backups
- Encrypt VMware virtual machine backups
- Test your VMware virtual machine backups
Backup VMware Virtual Machines at the Host Level
Typically, you want to backup your VMware virtual machine infrastructure from the “host” level. This is generally done by interfacing with VMware vCenter server which allows having access to all the hosts/clusters in the VMware virtual infrastructure as well as to the virtual machines those hosts/clusters are running. Most data protection solutions today allow interfacing with VMware vCenter server. This provides many benefits including a central management point to create VMware virtual machine backups. Backing up the virtual machine centrally at the vCenter level means much greater efficiency in the data protection solution. In traditional backup solutions, backup operations were handled by backup agents. These had to be managed individually and resulted in much management overhead. Managing the VMware virtual machine backups centrally with vCenter server is much more efficient and provides access to all the enterprise technologies and APIs available.
Take Image-Level Backups
Image-level backups have many advantages over traditional file level backups. Image-level backups allow easily re-creating a virtual machine from scratch and restoring it in its entirety, including the configuration and settings that make up the virtual machine. Having only the files “inside” a virtual machine backed up only allows restoring the files to the disks. However, you would first have to recreate the virtual machine “shell” with all the settings needed including the disks and the appropriate sizes for those disks. Again, with image-level backups, the backup itself contains all those settings. Restoring the virtual machine will include both the settings, configuration, and files which saves time and allows you to meet RTOs much more easily.
Use Changed Block Tracking
In vSphere 4.X, VMware released changed block tracking. This was a major step forward for data protection solutions. Changed Block Tracking or CBT allows tracking changes at the block level of the VMDK file itself. This means that after each backup iteration, the data protection solution only needs to copy over the “changed blocks” since the last backup cycle. After the first full backup, each backup iteration is extremely efficient, only copying the changed data which saves time, disk space, and network bandwidth. Make sure your data protection solution utilizes changed block tracking and make use of it.
Make Sure VMware Tools are Installed
VMware Tools provides the special services and drivers needed to interface with the underlying vSphere infrastructure. Running the latest version of VMware Tools in your virtual machines ensures the best performance for your virtual machines and it also makes sure you are able to capture application aware backups. Most data protection solutions make use of VMware Tools to properly quiesce the virtual machine when taking a backup that is set to be application aware or provide transactional consistency. With those factors in mind, it should be best practice to make sure all your virtual machines have VMware Tools running and these are updated to the latest version available and supported by your environment.
Use Application Aware Backups
As mentioned above, application aware backups provide transactional consistency. What is this exactly? Generally, when thinking about transactional consistency, we most likely think about databases. To avoid corruption, databases depend on the consistency of the transactions to be valid. Application aware backups interact with the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy service to properly flush application data from memory as well as pending file operations to disk before the VSS snapshot is taken of the files on disk. This ensures that the data on disk is consistent and the application is backed up with transactional consistency. It also provides the benefit of being able to restore the backup quickly without any additional steps to bring the application to a consistent state such as replaying logs, etc. It should definitely be on a VMware virtual machine backup checklist to backup virtual machines hosting applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server with application aware backups.
Encrypt Virtual Machine Backups
Security is on the minds of everyone these days. Organizations must think not only about the security of production data but also the security of data contained in backups. If you think about it, the data contained in backups will be your production data at a point in time. Additionally, with GDPR compliance set to take full effect in May, 2018, organizations need to especially get a handle on compliance and security of backups. Making sure VMware backups are encrypted is essential. Encrypting the data both in flight as it travels across the network as well as when it is sitting on disk makes sure the data is never exposed without protection. Encryption makes the data unreadable to a would-be attacker who may gain access to the raw backup data. Without the encryption key, the data cannot be accessed. This ensures the security of the backup data and by extension, production data.
Test Your VMware Virtual Machine Backups
Backups are only good if they can be restored. All too often, many have made the mistake of assuming their backups of business-critical resources are good, only to find out in a disaster, their backups are no good or do not contain the expected data. Having a regimen of testing your VMware backups is crucial to making sure your data is good and is restorable. Modern data protection solutions that have built in mechanisms to test backups in an automated way, allow for very effective and efficient testing of backups. The arduous manual methods of testing are covered by these built in mechanisms. Vembu BDR Suite allows very verbose automated testing for backup verification purposes. Vembu is able to mount the backup locally to check for corruption. Then, a check disk is run against the backup to verify there is no corruption or files missing. Finally, a boot check is performed which boots the virtual machine and then captures a screenshot of the booted VM that is attached to a verification report. This is a powerful way to perform backup verification and makes sure you can count on your backup data when needed.
Concluding Thoughts
There are several best practices that you want to follow when it comes to backing up VMware virtual machines. This VMware virtual machine backup checklist covers some of the major areas of focus in looking at both effective, efficient, and secure VMware backups. As resilient as today’s enterprise virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere are, backups are still needed to protect against data loss. The natively built in high availability mechanisms don’t protect against data loss as a result of user actions or possible security breaches. Organizations today need capable data protection solutions that enable protecting their VMware virtual machines with backups, replication, and offsite DR copies, including tape support for archive data. By following the recommended 3-2-1 backup rule, organizations ensure resiliency of their data as well as being able to meet and exceed both Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives.
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