Note: these are my (mostly) unedited session notes. The session focused on backup best practices for virtualization. Other live blogs from VISION can be found here and here.
70-90% of backups are not restorable
Backup windows are huge
Virtualization makes these problems worse
easy to make VMs, VM sprawl etc, portable, VDI (great target for deduplication)
Majority of restore requests (80%) are individual backup restores, not an entire VM
Guest level backup – (agent on every vm) <-traditional
Image level backup – (VMFS volume) <-better way
Top 5 pain points for data growth & backup administration
Tiered storage build out
no one wants chubby primary storage
tech refresh
backup redesign
consolidation
Virtualization adoption
(via The Info Pro 2010)
Best practice 1: online data protection using integrated tools (array-based snapshots, etc)
Best practice 2: Network efficient backup & recovery using advanced disk-based backup
PC DL B2D Appliance – preloaded with Symantec software
doesn’t negate backup to tape necessary
but customers are finding they don’t need tape at all
Can handle 32 TB of deduplication pool
Best practice 3: Deduplication is key to virtualization backup
Group vms in 2 groups – Backup group every other week, with 2 weeks of incremental backups.
Avg VM size is 30 – 45G
EqualLogic protection with offhost backups
App servers write to EQL
DL B2D creates snaoshots
Data is backed up from the snapshots & deduped
Dell AIM – giving personalities to servers. Assign a persona so server can be moved around, so VMs can be moved to different servers as needed