The ‘Not-To-Do’ Guide for VMware Backup
While virtualization is clearly the happening upgrade to existing traditional physical environment, most people still have trouble understanding the underlying difference between physical and virtual environments. This leads to wrong practices, especially in backing up VMs which results in unwanted resource utilization affecting the core advantage of adapting to a virtual environment.
Below is the list of common practices that needs to be corrected in order to get the best out of virtual environments.
Guest OS is not the backup target:
While physical machines do have backup agents installed for backup purposes, the case of VMs is different. Installing backup agent on guest OSes has never been and will never be the best practice to do. Though guest OS perform the desired function of user requirements, the actual processed data is stored in physical device which needs to be accessed via virtualization layer. Thus backing up via agents installed in guest OS results in heavy resource utilization due to virtual layers used for I/O of backup data storage and retrieval.
Thus the agents need to be installed in the host machine that manages entire set of VMs created which reduce resource utilization and improves backup performance significantly. Also backups via host server will result in block level backups where as backups via guest OS is processed in file level, this significantly have a huge difference in performance as well as storage space utilization.
Note: Backing up of physical data center separately, skipping out installing agent in host server will result in inconsistent backup data. So make sure you install a backup agent in host server for backup requirements.
VM Snapshots is meant to be restore points only:
Snapshots feature on VMs are meant to provide point-in-time restores for VMs in case of a system corruption. Though configuring multiple snapshots is possible, they are never meant to be the primary relying source as backups. When a system corruption occurs, the snapshots can be used to restore the machine to a previous known good working state. But it also deletes the snapshots taken after the point-in-time of restored snapshots. Also file level restores is not possible via snapshots.
The major drawback is unwanted resource utilization, creating more number of snapshots will result in such resource wastage. Each snapshot is considered as separate file and will increase in size as files in it gets written. This results datastores to run out of storage.
Configure your backup schedules wisely:
Running n number of backups at the same time from multiple VMs will result in high resource utilization in data center as it takes more data written to it from multiple backup sources. This results in more time taken for backups and a sudden distortion in connectivity will result in data loss. Also the resource utilized for backup process cannot be used for other requirements.
Similarly, running backups on multiple VMs from a single host at the same time will also result in heavy resource utilization, thus leading the host unusable for its desired primary purpose. Thus, wisely scheduling your backup schedules will result in improved performance.
Make room for backup server:
The backup server does not work for writing and restoring of backup data. It also has its own tasks to perform for improved performance and to maintain smart storage allocations. Apart from backups and restores, the servers also does compression, deduplication and encryption processes for efficient management. Thus always make sure you have more resource available for backup server to perform its functions to the core. Make your backups run at the maximum speed it could that reduce the time taken for separate backup processes and does complete the work on time. This results in freeing up resources for backup server.
Never let the backup server starve for resource which results in bad performance results.
Vembu BDR suite offers the best in class features for effectively backing up a VMware environment, to learn more: Vembu VMware Backup
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