Symantec NBU

By Jack Fegreus
published: Tuesday, October 20 2009

Automating D2D Backups of Virtual Machines

With NetBackup 6.5, IT is able to address the issues of data growth and storage resource utilization in a virtual operating environment via policy-driven data protection processes that reduce operator errors and promote automation.

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.

Given the focus surrounding IT service management, it is important to note that NetBackup requires system and storage administrators to create policies in order to initiate and manage all data protection processes. From choosing media servers to enforcing life-cycle constraints on backup files, even ad hoc unscheduled backup and restore actions require an IT administrator to invoke a NetBackup policy.

To simplify the creation of a backup policy-or at least jump start the initial definition of a backup policy-NetBackup provides a wizard, which applies common defaults as it creates a policy. NetBackup offers IT administrators a powerful combination of policies and templates that allow them to quickly assign a storage life cycle for backup data-from creation to expiration-on all storage resources across physical locations.

Under the NetBackup framework, when a data protection process needs to access a storage device, the enterprise master server assigns a media server to handle the task. The enterprise master server uses the selection of media servers to optimize storage resource utilization. To load balance and scale data protection, NetBackup 6.5 enables enterprise master servers to dynamically allocate the control of storage devices based on media server OS factors, such as CPU usage, memory usage, I/O load, and the number of active jobs. Our second server, which featured a quad-core CPU, was set up as a media server and also functioned as the VCB proxy server for backups of our VMware virtual operating environment.

On our third NetBackup data protection server, we ran NetBackup PureDisk 6.5.2 in order to provide our test bed with a data deduplication service. NetBackup PureDisk runs its data deduplication process on the client system rather than the server. Client-side deduplication has benefits for both physical and virtual server backups that occur over a local area network (LAN) because it lowers both network traffic and backup storage requirements.

With NetBackup, IT has two powerful data deduplication options for VM backups in a VMware environment. IT can either run a PureDisk client on a VM or run the deduplication process in the NetBackup media server with the NetBackup PureDisk Deduplication Option (PDDO). The latter option is particularly powerful when the media server also serves as the VCB proxy server.

From an IT operations perspective, backup administrators continue to work with the resource virtualization and policy-driven operations of NetBackup, while PDDO transparently adds a data deduplication service. What's more, PDDO adds a copy of the backup meta data sent to PureDisk to the NetBackup Catalog, which enables IT administrators to restore backup images processed with PDDO very quickly.