Backup Migraines
If you’re like most IT staff, the first time you hear that you’ve got to backup VMware – or backup anything, for that matter – you immediately feel that migraine coming on. You look at your calendar and cross off any plans you had for the weekend, because you think you’ll be spending your off hours babysitting the backup.
However, according to the latest software news, there are products available which allow you to backup VMware in real time. With innovative disk throttling, hot backups are able to take place anytime without taxing the server. Because the backups do not negatively impact the server performance while they are being performed, they can be done during regular business hours. With this type of backup solution, there’s no need to schedule the VMware backup into the change control process. There’s no longer a need to have backups take place overnight or on the weekends.
How is this possible? By employing virtual backup appliances, (called VBAs), the virtual environment VMware created is leveraged in order to backup itself! And really, isn’t that the way it ought to be? What would be the point of having migrated to a virtual environment which allowed you to consolidate hardware, only to overlay it with a bulky, costly, hardware dependent backup solution? Talk about a migraine! That would simply be backwards.
These virtual machines performing the backup operations are doing so at the block level, rather than the file level. This saves both time and storage space. By making the backups incremental in scale, they can be de-duplicated at the source before sending only the necessary data to be backed up. And because the backups are done at the block level, the restores can be done at the block level as well. This saves a lot of time because there’s no need to undergo virtual disk mounting procedures in order to perform file level restores.
This software news seems almost too good to be true – but it’s the real deal. It is possible to implement a hardware independent, real time backup VMware solution for your virtual environment. Through the use of unique disk throttling, VBAs, and block level backups, you can backup VMware anytime. There’s no longer a need to be spending your nights and weekends checking on a server backup. Now that impending migraine seems to be fading away, doesn’t it? And maybe you’ll be able to watch the ball game this weekend after all!