Veeam Backup and Recovery
Adding to the complexity of today’s datacenter operations are the many regulatory mandates to secure and maintain critical business data at a granular file level. File-level compliance mandates, however, can also complicate another important datacenter initiative: server virtualization.
A key characteristic of a virtual environment is the encapsulation of VM logical disk volumes as single physical disk files. This representation makes image-level backups faster than traditional file-level backups and enhances restoration as virtual disks can be restored as either a whole disk image or as individual files. That’s why general purpose backup packages integrate with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to provide image-based backup.
Veeam Backup & Replication software is a dedicated image-level data protection package that unifies backup and replication in a VMware environment and easily integrates with existing general purpose backup packages. Veeam provides IT with a data protection application specifically designed to deal with the complex data protection issues found in a sophisticated VMware vSphere 4 environment supported by host servers running either the ESX or ESXi hypervisor.
Veeam Backup & Replication can directly leverage the new vStorage APIs in a vSphere 4 environment to improve performance without VCB integration. That means small and medium business (SMB) sites without a Storage Area Network (SAN) in place can leverage the ESXi hypervisor with minimal investment. More importantly, Veeam Backup & Replication software extends disk imaging operations to include on-site or off-site replication for rapid recovery. Veeam Backup & Replication can also utilize the new Changed-Block Tracking feature of VMFS to accelerate incremental backup and replication, recognize virtual disks with thin provisioning, and leverage hot-add for virtual disks, when deployed within a VM.
What’s more, when making the business impact analysis required for any IT disaster recovery plan, Veeam Backup & Replication helps resolve balancing two important issues: the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)—the maximum period of time that it could take to recover—and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO)—the maximum amount of data measured in time prior to the disruption that could be lost in the recovery process. To provide IT with a better RPO, Veeam Backup & Replication will by default ensure transaction consistency with either VCB or the vStorage API. In addition, a backup administrator can configure Veeam Backup & Replication to use the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to ensure transaction consistency for VSS-aware applications running within a VM, including Active Directory, MS Exchange, or SQL Server.
Veeam Backup & Replication fully supports the VMware ESXi hypervisor, which many sites are now bringing into production as more servers are bundled with ESXi firmware. Nonetheless, the use of ESXi hosts can complicate backup and recovery processes as the architecture of ESXi differs significantly from ESX. To keep the ESXi hypervisor as compact as possible in order to be able to embed this hypervisor in firmware, VMware does not implement a service console in ESXi. Typically data protection applications, such as backup and replication, utilize the service console in ESX.
