With the release of VMware’s vSphere 4.0 there comes some great features and additions. One that hasn’t gotten as much attention as others is the Data Recovery feature. While FT (Fault Tolerance) is cool and flashy, Data Recovery is probably useful to more people, especially in smaller shops.
So, what is Data Recovery? It’s the new simplified method to backup and restore virtual machines. It’s not a replacement for standard backup systems but can be used in place of add-ons such as vRanger Pro and Veeam Backup, assuming you don’t need some of the advanced functions they provide. Basically, it creates a backup copy of your selected VMs to another data store or CIFS server. From that location you can then back up those VM files to tape, other disk, whatever your backup system happens to be.
Data Recovery Architecture
Data Recovery is implemented as an add-on to VCenter and uses a virtual appliance.
Destination storage can be any supported storage such as iSCSI, Fibre Channel, or NFS as well as a CIFS share. One of the best features of this system is that it employs integrated deduplication to save storage space. Be sure to store backups of VMs with similar data in the same location. For example, if you have 10 servers running Windows 2008 Server be sure those are backed up to the same location so that you only store one copy of the Windows 2008 Server files. The deduplication happens in-line as the VMs are being backed up, not once they are on the destination storage. This is a big deal since the latter would require more space to hold the data until deduplication happened but since the process is in-line that isn’t the case.
Backup & Restore
Backups and restores are done via the GUI interface. Just select the VMs you want to backup and the destination storage you want to use. VMs are backed up via a snapshot. Windows systems can take advantage of VSS to get application consistent copies.
One thing to note is that the only option for backups is the whole VM. You can’t selectively pick certain files and directories, it’s all or nothing. That is where the data deduplication is appreciated.
Restores are pretty much the reverse, but one bright spot is that you can restore an individual file. Please note that this feature is experimental and not fully supported.
Thoughts
Data Recovery is a simple way to handle backups of your VMs, but is it for everyone? For one, VMware says that Data Recovery is good for up to 100 VMs. So if you’re environment is larger than that it may not be for you. Also, if you employ other backup systems that plug directly in to VMware what you are using now may be a better alternative. We have many clients using vRanger Pro and Veeam Backup with great success. Will those types of customers continue to need a third-party application? That remains to be seen but I think many people will use Data Recovery. It’s included in most licensing options and integrates directly into vCenter. Unless they need some advanced functionality in the other apps they may decide to forgo the expense and just use Data Recovery.
Useful links:
[...] 22, 2009 by nashwj Last week I wrote a bit about vSphere’s Data Recovery feature. There are a lot of good things to talk about in [...]
[...] Power with vSphere Last week I wrote a bit about vSphere’s Data Recovery feature. There are a lot of good things to talk about in [...]