Has kept current vmware certified professional vcp status

The Essential Guide to Legacy-Free Disaster Recovery Sponsored by

Executive summary

The benefits of VMware virtualization for servers are unmistakable. The last five years have seen a relentless march towards virtual being the deployment option of choice. At the VMworld 2010 keynote in San Francisco, VMware CEO Paul Maritz even quoted statistics from IDC that 2010 was the first year that servers shipped with a virtualization platform outnumbered common physical servers. This shift is due to the well-known benefits of server consolidation: lower server hardware costs, reduced datacenter power consumption, and increased efficiency of operations. But availability, disaster recovery (DR), and disaster avoidance benefits are also drivers for increased virtualization and key enablers for bringing Tier 1 business-critical workloads onto VMware platforms.

Journey to DR enlightenment

The whole virtualization industry is very fond of describing a “virtualization journey” or “the journey to the cloud” computing nirvana. The journey is usually in reference to the maturity of a company’s adoption of proven practices and the gradual evolution of best practices and capabilities. The journey can also mean that organizations are taking their already mature best practices and keeping pace with new evolving technologies.

•� Reliability—Corresponds closely to RPOs. Addressing database transactional consistence, avoiding corrupted file systems, and ensuring systems boot when restored are key to addressing this concern.

•� Cost—The cost of many different software solutions or replicating storage arrays can prevent DR solutions from getting off the ground. DR solutions need to be affordable.

DR past

IT environments have always had to navigate a complicated matrix of applications and supported operating system configurations, regardless of VMware virtualization. Before VMware virtualization became mainstream, in order to properly protect the application and its data, you had to install a software backup agent and back up the application data and settings to external media. In order to recover this application should disaster happen, you’d have to acquire a relatively similar physical server to the failed one, install the operating system following a run book that instructed you on the exact settings needed, patch the OS to the appropriate level, and reinstall the application and the backup software. As the final step, you’d attach the external media to find the backed up data and restore the data to the newly loaded server. Chances are that during this process you’d do something that was not the same as the original production server, so the application would not function properly the first time and troubleshooting would need to take place to make sure the application was ready for worthwhile use again. It was also not uncommon to discover that backups or replicated sets of data were missing, corrupted, or suffering from another malady that prevented successful restoration. Unless test recoveries were performed daily, these holes could be difficult to discover, but the cost and time needed to perform daily tests were too high.

The Essential Guide to Legacy-Free Disaster Recovery

Virtualization primer

•� Encapsulation: VMs encapsulate a complete computing environment

•� Hardware independence: VMs run independently of the underlying hardware

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The Essential Guide to Legacy-Free Disaster Recovery

VM snapshots

To get around this problem, VMware developed VM snapshot technology to provide a way to allow VMs to continue operation while their underlying virtual disk files are safely copied to a recovery location. When a VM snapshot is taken, the writes to the original disk are paused for a moment while a new file called a delta file or snapshot file is created to store new writes to disk. Developers and system administrators originally used this capability as a way to test new software updates and have the capability to quickly roll back to a known good state, but this technology has great DR applications as well. Since the parent virtual disks stay static and unchanged during the duration that the snapshot is open, the door is now open for brave administrators and enterprising software developers to develop the first whole virtual machine backup and recovery systems.

As compelling as the benefits of virtualization-enabled DR would be, there are some well-known deficiencies with the first iteration of VMware-aware backups. Every DR planner should be aware of these when designing or evaluating a DR solution for virtual infrastructures. These common deficiencies are:

Lack of guaranteed backups: Reliability of backed up or replicated VMs is not guaranteed, and it’s a slow, manual process to verify they work.

It’s these deficiencies that drove many organizations to take a "belt and suspenders" approach to DR on VMware, using both VMware-aware backup products and traditional backup software. This approach means you need to maintain two backup systems, pay for two backup software contracts, require IT support teams to learn two or more redundant data protection skills, and one extra step to complete when a disaster is declared. Although this approach ultimately provides some reliability, it does so at the expense of speed, complexity, and the cost of your DR solution. This legacy approach to DR is heavy baggage slowing you down on your journey to a legacy-free DR solution.

Veeam vPower is legacy-free DR

DR strategies must address the four main concerns identified earlier: uptime, reliability, cost, and complexity. Veeam Backup & Replication addresses these concerns like no other product before it.

Uptime—The name of the game in DR is uptime. Once a disaster is declared, the race is on to meet the RTO. With InstantRestoreTM, restores of full VMs, files or application items can happen instantly without intermediary steps. vPower allows a VM to run directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup file. This means a VM can be restored at the speed a VM takes to be booted from the backup file. In addition, SmartCDP allows the option to have RPOs in the minutes. SmartCDP leverages VMware vStorage integration to enable the fastest VM replication ever and provide near-continuous data protection (near-CDP).

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The Essential Guide to Legacy-Free Disaster Recovery

But operating a successful virtual-first policy takes more than policies and big sticks to motivate application owners to go along with a Veeam-first DR strategy. It means that virtualization engineers need to be solution providers to make sure availability and DR capabilities are the same or better on VMware platforms. I

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Sean is a ten-year IT veteran with a background in software development, database administration, security coordination, and IT management. The last five years, he has focused on developing his expertise in VMware virtualization and surrounding technologies. He has kept current VMware Certified Professional (VCP) status on VI 2.5, VI 3.5 and vSphere 4. In 2009 Sean was awarded VMware vExpert status, one of 300 globally to receive the award recognizing their contribution to the virtualization community. Since then, Sean has been an active member of the virtualization community as a notorious Twitter contributor with the handle of @vSeanClark, as co-instigator of the popular community party at VMworld, and as http://seanclark.us. He has provided guidance on virtualization strategy to businesses of all sizes and from all industries, and is currently a virtualization consultant with TEKsystems working on a long-term cloud computing project for a Fortune 500 company.

About Veeam Software

Backup

VMware vSphere

by running it directly from a backup file

U-AIR™ (Universal Application-Item Recovery)—recover individual