Symantec NBU

In a virtual operating environment, IT system administrators are immediately confronted with the question: What should be backed up? Should system administrators concentrate their efforts on the logically exposed virtual machines (VMs) running important business applications. Or should they focus on the virtual operating environment applications and files that create those logical VMs.

At the heart of this problem is the fact that a VM has two distinct personas. First, there is the IT-centric persona of a virtual operating environment application that needs to run on a virtual operating environment. Second, there is the logical line-of-business persona of a VM as a standard computer system.

To resolve that dichotomy, Symantec NetBackup integrates deep into VMware infrastructure to leverage the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) API, the vStorage API, and vCenter Server. Using NetBackup, IT administrators have the ability to dynamically restore the backup set of a VM running a version of Windows Server to either its native ESX Server state-using vmdk and other VMFS files-or as a logical Windows system with NTFS formatted files.

More importantly, all NetBackup data protection processes fit perfectly into any IT service management initiative. The goal of IT service management is to automate the standard tasks of systems and storage administrators by building upon classic quality-control (QC) practices for process management. To give IT a vital edge in Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance, NetBackup provides a completely hardware-independent policy-based backup and restore framework to implement backup as a robust end-to-end automated process, which extends to the NetBackup PureDisk data deduplication environment. NetBackup even provides for quality control and process improvement via reporting tools that allow IT administrators to define and monitor service level compliance for SLAs entered into with line of business managers.

Backup, Store, Dedupe Triple Play

For a better perspective on the ability of NetBackup to enhance critical virtual operating environment and IT service management initiatives, VSM Labs set up a data protection test scenario using VMware Virtual Infrastructure. We focused our tests on eight hosted VMs that were configured as application servers running Windows Server 2003 along with SQL Server and IIS.

IT backup loads are dependent on a number of factors, including data retention requirements and the nature of the data in terms of compressibility and redundancy. This makes a virtual operating environment the perfect microcosm to examine all factors impacting backup load processing. Of particular importance is the growing practice of IT, at small to large enterprises alike, to use multiple VMs to establish the system availability and scalability that is characteristic of a large data center. This practice of utilizing multiple VMs, each dedicated to running a particular application, generates a prodigious amount of duplicate data within a virtual operating environment.

To support all of NetBackup's data protection services, including data deduplication via NetBackup PureDisk, VSM Labs configured three servers. The first server, ran Windows Server 2003 and functioned as the NetBackup Enterprise Master Server. The Master Server maintains the NetBackup catalog of internal databases, handles the creation of data protection policies, manages device and media selection, and can also be utilized as a media server.