Today’s business-critical workloads are more technology driven than ever before. Virtualization technology has allowed organizations today to be able to make real use out of the powerful physical device hardware available.
Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor is gaining popularity and has matured over the last couple of releases in leaps and bounds. Especially with the new Storage Spaces Direct technology released with Windows Server 2016 and now with Windows Server 2019, organizations have a robust software-defined storage architecture on which to run production workloads.
Hyper-V itself provides an extremely resilient platform on which businesses today can run their production virtual machines. With the built-in high availability mechanisms in the hypervisor itself, guest clustering, and all the way down to the software-defined storage rebuild mechanisms found in Storage Spaces Direct, customers can make use of these powerful high availability mechanisms to ensure workloads are always available.
It brings up an interesting point of discussion among many who may rely on only high availability to protect workloads when assuming that resiliency equals data protection.
However, this can lead to data loss.
Let’s look at the topic with Hyper-V – Do you need to Backup Hyper-V?
Let’s explore this topic and see why that is a wise thing to do.
Data Protection vs Data Resiliency
When thinking about high availability data, a customer could make the assumption that if you have many high availability mechanisms that are protecting the ability to reach the data, then backups are an unnecessary and costly mechanism that isn’t really needed.
However, this can be a dangerous assumption to make. There are many potential dangers to data that data availability or high availability may not provide protection against.
Typically, the primary use case of high-availability mechanisms is to account for hardware failure. This means these mechanisms are in place to protect against server failure, drive failure, network failure, or even a total site-level failure.
However, what about instances where hardware does not fail, but data is affected?
What are some of these situations where data may need to be recovered and that simple availability to data or the location where data is stored, is not the only valuable business metric?
Let’s think about a few common scenarios that tend to happen daily in environments that have nothing to do with the high-availability of data but rather the recoverability of data.
Let’s take a scenario:
When a user deletes business-critical files from a virtual machine running on top of a Hyper-V environment.
Even though you have not lost a host, storage hardware, network or other physical components of the infrastructure, business continuity has now been affected. This is the case even though the high-availability of the infrastructure is still perfectly intact. Without a means to protect the data that is housed in the Hyper-V virtual environment, the data would not be recoverable from the high-availability mechanisms that have been implemented.
Taking the above example a bit further, what about a malicious high-level employee or even an IT administrator who may have been disgruntled and deleted large portions of the virtual infrastructure?
Again, the deletion of the virtual resources is not an event the hypervisor would view as a failure per se since this is a fully acceptable operation, and the user may well have the authorized permission from a system level perspective to do so.
All too often in the news today, one of the most prevalent dangers to organization data is ransomware. Ransomware can affect anyone from individual users, all the way to large enterprise organizations. It slyly and silently creeps into a network environment and then starts encrypting all files that it comes into contact with. It can even proliferate itself laterally through the network. Entire business operations can be shut down from this type of malicious data corruption. Again, high-availability mechanisms have no effect on the business continuity impact that is inflicted.
Data Protection of Hyper-V environments is the only way to ensure that your business-critical data is safe and secure. By following the 3-2-1 backup best practice methodology, organizations need to ensure they have multiple copies of the production data, contained in backups that are spread across different geographic locations if possible. This ensures that even if an entire site is lost, including a portion or set of backup data, due to some type of disaster, there are additional copies of the backup data that are housed safely in another location.
Data Protection mechanisms include backups, offsite DR copies of backup data to another location or to the cloud, replicated virtual machines for site-level recovery, and archived backup storage such as is contained on tape device media.
Hyper-V Data Protection Key Elements
Data protection for enterprise environments utilizing the Hyper-V hypervisor needs to include certain key features to adequately protect and provide the ability to recover mission-critical workloads. As with any hypervisor configuration, businesses utilizing Hyper-V for production virtual machines are no doubt doing this by means of Hyper-V clusters.
A Hyper-V cluster utilizes the Windows Failover cluster role to allow multiple hosts to house the compute/memory of production virtual machines. This also allows the Hyper-V cluster to provide those high-availability mechanisms that are already mentioned which are certainly desirable in production. These include the ability to withstand a host failure. When a host fails, the remaining cluster nodes will pick up the workload of the virtual machines that were running on the failed hosts.
A data protection solution needs to be able to correctly interact with a Hyper-V cluster configuration to be viewed as a viable solution for Hyper-V data protection. This allows interacting with the Hyper-V cluster name instead of the individual Hyper-V hosts that make up the cluster.
Additionally, some of the critical features are:
- Creating offsite copies of the backups of the virtual machines
- Ability to replicate production Hyper-V virtual machines to additional sites
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 – Enterprise Data Protection for Hyper-V Clusters
When choosing a Hyper-V data protection solution, organizations need to consider a solution that provides all of the above-mentioned functionality. This includes the ability to protect Hyper-V environments at the cluster level. Additionally, having built-in mechanisms to ship backups offsite or to the cloud is critical. Creating replica VMs as well as having the ability to restore these VMs “instantly” allows businesses to have extremely low RTO and RPO SLAs. Vembu comes through on all of these and many other data protection demands related to Hyper-V and Hyper-V clusters.
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 does this with intelligent, application-consistent backups that allow organizations to have confidence in the backups of business-critical applications in their environments. These include Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange. Vembu is a fully cloud-aware application that allows interacting with today’s public cloud environments to provision infrastructure and offers a solution for storing backup copies in the cloud. Vembu also allows organizations the ability to use traditional storage media such as tape drives for long-term data archival.
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