Virtual Machine Backup Automation – Why?
Automation is the king of the hill when thinking about operational efficiency with development as well as operations in today’s fast paced world of IT. Environments are simply moving too fast and have to be agile such that manual operations management is simply not feasible any longer. This also applies to data protection in today’s environments as well. Virtualization environments today generally run many VMs with many applications they are hosting which are key to business-critical processes. Protecting these workloads in an automated way is key to ensuring business continuity.
What data protection solution features are helpful in automating virtual machine backups? How can applications be backed up in an automated fashion where application consistency is maintained? We will look at these important virtual machine backup automation features that are key to ensuring mission critical VMs are protected and data protection is effective and efficient.
Important Virtual Machine Backup Automation Features
When thinking of automation and automated processes, you may not readily think about data protection solutions or virtual machine backups. However, when architecting a data protection solution for virtual machine backups, having automated processes and utilizing automation for protecting mission critical applications is key to having an effective and efficient virtual machine backup solution and overall data protection solution. Let’s look at the following virtual machine backup automation features:
- Backup, replication, and offsite copy scheduling
- Application-aware backup protection
- Transaction log truncation
- Retention policy automation
- Replication Network Mapping and Re-IPing
Backup, replication, and offsite copy scheduling
Scheduling backups, replication, and offsite copies is a simple, yet powerful mechanism when looking at important virtual machine backup automation features. Being able to schedule backups, replication, and offsite copies, allows consistent backups, replication, and copies on a regular interval. This ensures having RPOs that meet business SLAs with little to no human intervention. Additionally, scheduling of backups, replication, and offsite copies allows choosing optimal schedules that minimize impact to any business-critical systems in production. When dealing with tens or even hundreds of VMs in an environment, scheduling backup, replication, and offsite copies is essential to having effective and efficient backups of virtual machines running production workloads.
Virtual machine backup automation with scheduling options
Application-aware backup protection
When it comes to automating backups for “applications”, application-aware processing is a critical component of a solid data protection solution. Why is this? Application-aware processing allows the data protection solution to properly quiesce the application workload that is running on the virtual machine. It also properly writes application information that may exist in memory or any pending I/O writes to disk. This ensures the application is left in a “consistent” state. This is extremely critical when dealing with database applications such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange Server.
This automated process of properly dealing with applications such as these using proper VSS processes, allows for transactionally consistent backups that require no additional steps to bring online after a restore. This saves time and potentially saves your business a tremendous amount of money. Often, every minute a business-critical application down can cost organizations thousands of dollars if not much more. Having an automated approach to properly backing up business-critical applications using application-aware backups is key to ensuring business SLAs.
Using Application Aware backups allows consistent transactional backups with database applications
Transaction log truncation
Another extremely important feature with data protection solutions and virtual machine backup automation is the ability to truncate logs after a successful backup. Having a data protection solution that can perform log truncation on a database driven application takes the heavy lifting out of log maintenance and helps to alleviate any potential disk space issues as a result. The process to truncate logs works hand in hand with the application-aware backup functionality. By properly backing up an application such as a Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange Server using the specific VSS writers for those applications, the application logs can be properly truncated in a safe way. Since the backups are transactionally consistent, logs are truncated and space is reclaimed.
Vembu allows truncating transaction logs after successful application aware backups
Retention Policy Automation
By automating retention policies, organizations can meet their desired RPOs as well as maintain and purge unneeded restore points from the backup repository. Depending on business SLAs the retention policy can be adjusted so that the number of versions of files, virtual machines, and application states can be kept for restoration or offsite copies. Having a way to automatically apply retention policies is an important part of virtual machine backup automation.
Vembu allows enabling retention and merge options to control restore points
Replication Network Mapping and Re-IPing
Most will have replica virtual machines that are copied to a DR network that operated with different network subnets than production networks. This means that it is critically important to think about replicated virtual machine network configuration, especially during a failover. Since the replicated virtual machine is an exact copy of the production virtual machine, it will carry over all the assigned and configured network settings including the configured vSwitch portgroup configuration. An important virtual machine backup automation feature is the ability with the data protection solution to automate the reconfiguration of the network and vSwitch configuration to match the network configuration that exists in DR or secondary facility that is receiving the replicated virtual machines.
Vembu provides the ability with replication to configure networks that exist in the replicated site
Additionally, changing IP addresses can be a tedious task if this is not performed in an automated fashion. Data protection solutions that allow automating or creating rules for replicated VMs can alleviate this headache when virtual machines are failed over. This can save an enormous amount of time. The last thing that administrators need to worry about when failing over virtual machines is having to reconfigure network settings.
Vembu provides Network Re-IP Mapping rules that allow easily reconfiguring replicated virtual machine IP addresses
Thoughts
As shown, there are several important virtual machine backup automation features that allow extremely efficient and effective data protection operations. By utilizing such features as backup, replication, and offsite DR scheduling, application aware backups, transaction log truncation, retention policies, and network mapping and re-IPing, administrators can effectively automate extremely important aspects of backups and replication. Automation can take the heavy lifting and human error aspect out of data protection and allow for a consistent and error free backup environment. Using an automated solution such as Vembu BDR Suite allows organizations to successfully implement these and other automation strategies with virtual machine backups.
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