CommVault Simpana 8.0

While the virtualization of resources can help IT establish more highly efficient operations, virtualization also introduces multiple levels of logical abstraction and redirection of storage resources that can obscure and complicate important IT operations. To help IT deal with critical backup recovery issues within a virtual infrastructure, Simpana provides a Universal Virtual Server Agent (VSA) that can either be installed on a physical or virtual server running Windows.

To help reduce the impact of backups on the physical hosts and virtual machines (VMs), the Simpana VSA simplifies common administration tasks with such features as VM auto-discovery, which discovers newly added virtual machines and automatically places them into existing backup policies. Simpana also simplifies a major issue for every VM: two distinct personas. First, there’s the IT-centric persona of an application running on a host. Second, there’s the logical line-of-business persona of a VM as a standard computer. As a result, service recovery in a virtual operating environment is an extremely important issue, as the risk of a single host failing cascades to multiple virtual machines (VMs) running multiple applications.

To resolve this issue, CommVault offers a suite of license-able data management modules, which leverage common services to provide enterprise-class data protection, archive, replication, search and e-Discovery. For backup and recovery processes, IT is able to control and monitor all end-to-end processes in a single pane of glass via the CommCell Console.

Within every CommCell configuration, a CommServe server coordinates all communication among CommCell components. The CommServe server also maintains a database of information relating to the CommCell configuration. One or more media servers, also known as CommVault MediaAgents, manage external storage resources for the CommCell. By adding multiple servers to run the MediaAgents, IT is able to enhance both scalability and availability of storage services.

From a single backup job, administrators can restore a Windows-based VM as either a set of VMware container files or a set of Windows system files. Simpana can also be deployed in a number of ways, including as an agent inside a virtual machine or on a proxy server with the Universal Virtual Server Agent for off-host backups of virtual operating environment servers and disk-level recovery.

To get a better perspective on Simpana’s ability to support the adoption of a virtual operating environment, VSM Labs set up a data protection test scenario using VMware Virtual Infrastructure to host eight active VMs running Windows Server 2003. Each test VM was configured as an application server running SQL Server and IIS.

Intelligent Data Agents