Virtual Machines

Virtual Machine Data Protection
VM Backup Options
Features and Benefits

Virtual Machine Data Protection

Unify Virtual Machine Backup, Restore, Replication and Recovery

AIMstor is specifically created to unify both physical and VM data protection strategies.

The ONLY Unified Backup and File Level Replication Solution for VM Data Protection

Eliminate the VM Backup Window as you know it
15X Improvement over traditional legacy Backup methods
95% I/O Overhead Reduction over traditional legacy Backup methods
Improve IT management efficiencies by 200% to 400%
Unify Replication/DR, Backup and Bare Metal Restore for VM and Physical Machines
Unify Compliance with Data Protection

VM Backup Options

How Does VM Backup Work?

VM's are virtualized instances which are compromised of a set of files; the virtual HDD as seen by the host system OS as a single file called a VMDK file, encapsulates all the non-volatile from that individual VM environment. So when you have multiple VM's or multiple virtual drives within a given VM, you have multiple VMDK files from the physical machine perspective.

Daily scheduled backups of VM's can be done several ways:

Backup via physical host of the VMDK files via agent on hosting server
Backup via VMware's API for data protection
Backup VM using legacy backup agent running within the VM
Backup VM using intelligent live backup agent with dedupe

All approaches have pro's and con's:

Backup via physical host of the VMDK files offers good DR capability, but getting to a specific file or directory often requires a full restore of the VM first, which can be very time consuming. Additionally, during the backup window, "Legacy Backup" products will perform a sequential read of the files. This requires that VMs be put in a quiescent mode for backup either by being brought offline or by scripting the creation of a snapshot and deletion thereafter. This imposes an I/O burden that will negatively affect running applications and usage of the VM data. An answer this is issue is that AIMstor, as a "Live Backup" product, sends only VMDK byte level changes, thus drastically reducing I/O impact and network bandwidth consumption, while improving performance, and providing better service levels and service continuity.

Backup via the VMware API, such as vStorage (VADP) helps by allowing backup of granular data of the individual VMs by simply using a single agent on the physical host system. With the release of the latest VADP vSphere API this method does a better job by allowing changed block tracking (CBT), which is a log that is created of changed data. The actual changed data is not retained, but the log will point the backup application to grab the last changed data within the VM.

So at the end of the day, when it comes time to do your backups, rather than issuing an intrusive IO burden on your virtual server to create the backup data set, you have just the changed data as block level incremental data. Unfortunately, you have only the last changes. You don't have the changes that happened in between. So if you are seeking the most granular Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), such as specific times of the day for file "x", it cannot be done with the existing VMware API's. Still, this approach has merit and should be considered.

Backup of a VM using a legacy backup agent means you load an agent into the VM. This has some nice advantages. First, you can get granular restore for specific files. For example, if you run backups several times a day, you can get multiple RPO's during each day. However, the legacy approach produces several issues. First, each backup requires intrusive scans of each Virtual Machine. This is bad. Secondly, legacy backup takes the whole incremental data set each time. This creates loads of unnecessary network traffic when sending it to the backup destination, and then it must be deduplicated.

Backup VM using intelligent live backup agent with deduplication requires you to deploy an agent at each VM where you want this capability. However, this provides several nice advantages, and is supported by AIMstor.

Only changed bytes are sent, so network load is extremely light
Changes are sent in real time, further reducing network load
Data is Single Instanced and Deduped at Source and Target
RPO can be 1 minute ago, last year, or anything in between
Granular restores are easy and fast for any RPO
Provide convenience of Live Backup of VMDK for DR

In summary it seems obvious that the approaches using Live Backup are optimal. Today, AIMstor can protect VM images through Live Backup of VMDK images, or through VM installed agents. Additionally AIMstor will provide vSphere support in Q3 of 2010, and current users can receive a free upgrade when to AIMstor vSphere when released.

Features and Benefits

Virtual Machine Environment Optimization

Feature: Benefit
Instant VM Classification: Through the User Interface, AIMstor identifies VM Machines distinctly, providing easy visual references to physical and virtual resources. Applying the right "VM specific" policies is done in a few seconds.
VM Flexibility: With VMware you have several options. Either put the agent on the VMware host machine, or put agents inside the VMware machines, or do a hybrid of both approaches. AIMstor Unified Repository deduplicates all data at VM source, and within the repository as well, managing all AIMstor tools for your AIMstor environment: Live Backup, CDP, Replication, Bare Metal Restore, File Versioning, and more.
Host Based AIMstor: The main benefit of putting the agent on the physical VM host is that disaster recovery becomes substantially quicker. You could also setup a policy and capture all current and new VM machines the moment they are created. By automating the recognition of VM's being created, DR is more easily accomplished, and granular changes made within a VM are captured as well.
Agent Based AIMstor: A fast install of AIMstor into the VM helps achieve intelligent and granular management and protection of VM data, just like a physical machine.
VM Backup Performance: AIMstor real-time data protection reduces and eliminates backup windows. Say goodbye to intrusive scans and trawls by legacy backup products. Your physical host server will breathe a sigh of relief as loads are vastly reduced, and replaced by even rates of real-time, change-specific data transfer and protection. VM backup window I/O nightmares are history.
VM Bare "Metal" Restore: Would you like to do a full DR restore onto a VM from a destroyed physical server? Or vice versa? AIMstor allows dissimilar machine Bare Metal Recovery which supports VM.

Virtual Machine Data Protection

Feature: Benefit
Next Generation Live Backup: Eliminates the inadequacies of Legacy Backup by providing zero-wait backup windows, unified deduplication, and fully unified disk repositories that can scale to your needs.
Continuous Data Protection, CDP: Similar to backup, but optimized for faster Recovery Time Objectives, AIMstor CDP can be used with Backup, and can use the same data, allowing the source to move the data only once. Perfect for a local Remote Office Repository to facilitate easy and ultra-fast restore.
Real-Time Replication: Synchronous, Asynychronous and Asynch Journaled File Level Replication for local and remote sites, with on-demand restore and disaster recovery. With Replicator, you can implement a single, truly unified solution, mixing other tools such as Backup, CDP and Versioning within the same policy instance. Eliminates bandwidth waste and capacity usage of Volume Replication.
File Versioning: Because AIMstor auto-classifies dataMore frequent backups cause no CPU or system overhead on the source machine. Data is captured incrementally as it is changed or created. A backup is in effect a point of consistency triggered from the source to create a snapshot in the repository.
Next-Generation Restore: Granular and full image restores, with indexed object store for search capable files. Browsing snapshots based on search parameters, and many other restore advantages that are simply not available outside of AIMstor.
Multi-Tier Backup Deduplication: Utilizing several backup deduplication schemes, from the point of primary data change awareness, to transfer of data, and post process, AIMstor reduces storage capacity needed many fold. See Data Deduplication for more information.
Bare Metal Recovery: Utilizes existing backup and CDP repository data to enable restore to same or dissimilar systems, such as VM to Physical, VM to VM, Physical to VM. Provides easy, 1-2-3 process for bringing up a system from a completely new replacement, fully unified as part of AIMstor.