Data Center Virtualization

Editor's Notes

• #13: Backup operations can affect performance and availability of the virtual environment if a traditional backup application agent is installed on each and every virtual machine. With multiple virtual machines on the same physical host, network bandwidth is much more limited than in physical environments. Thus, moving backup data across the network can quickly exceed available bandwidth. In addition, backup agents on virtual machines consume virtual machine memory and processing resources and require administrative overhead to maintain. NetBackup’s off-host image backups accomplished through our integration with VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) virtually eliminate the overhead of backup processing on virtual machines and network bandwidth requirements. This translates into greater backup performance while removing the need to install, maintain and upgrade agents on every virtual machine. NetBackup supports full and incremental backups of virtual machines and works with any backup storage. This includes support for VMware’s Change Block Tracking (CBT) and Block Optimization features. By only backing up what has changed or is active – backups are faster, and backup storage capacity is maximized.
• #15: Let’s face it, VMs are dynamic. They are easily created, cloned and migrated making protecting them a challenge. It also explains why virtual machine sprawl is a growing management challenge within IT organizations today. Many IT managers would be hard pressed to give an accurate count as to how many virtual machines they’re running or whether or not they’re all being protected. And, as the number of servers being virtualized grows, management of backup and recovery becomes more problematic. Avoid time consuming backup administration, unprotected VMs and overloading VM hosts with NetBackup VM Intelligent Policy (VIP). VIP leverages V-Ray to automatically discover, identify and protect VMs as they come online - whether they are new, cloned or migrated from another location. This means that VMs can be protected wherever they may reside, WITHOUT having to edit the backup policy. It basically let’s you put virtual machine protection on “auto-pilot”. This is significant because we’ve talked to customers who have a dedicated person doing nothing but aligning backup policies with datastores. Why waste a headcount doing something that can be automated with NetBackup?With VIP you can easily select (or filter) virtual machines for backup based on over 25 different VMware attributes for easier management. For example: Backup all the machines in Power On stateBackup all the machines where OS type is RedHat LinuxBackup all the virtual machines for which display name starts with VMprodIn addition, this filtering can allow VMware vCenter to balance the backup load across the various ESX servers thus improving performance while reducing impact. VIP automatically adjusts for any other changes that VMware technologies such as VMotion, Storage Vmotion, Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) etc. have made to every virtual machine. VIP is available with VMware and NetBackup 7.1.
• #38: OpsCenter, a free monitoring and reporting tool, and OpsCenter Analytics, its chargeable extended option, were introduced in NetBackup 7.0.NetBackup 7.5 introduces three new features for OpsCenter, Search, Restore and view based access controls. View based access control is simply a mechanism to control what clients and policies individual users can report on and restore from, however it is a significant step in terms of “multi-tenancy” support as it allows responsibility for selected clients to be delegated to individuals or groups.The restore feature extended the “Oracle cloning” feature introduced in NetBackup 7.1 and provides a much simpler, easier to use restore interface than the current BAR GUI .NetBackup Search – the third major new feature in NetBackup 7.5 – is a separate, linked application with it’s own server component. Like OpsCenter Analytics, NetBackup Search is a chargeable option (although the two components are licenses separately from each other). It is also important to note that the NetBackup Search server uses embedded technology that is only supported on Windows 2008R2 .
• #39: For large organizations or enterprises with multiple locations and data centers, managing backup and recovery can be a challenge, especially if the goal is to improve efficiency and use of resources. NetBackup OpsCenter, introduced in NetBackup 7.0, offers out of the box reporting, alerts, and monitoring screens designed to streamline the operations of data protection.New in NetBackup 7.5 are two features; Restore and Search and Hold. These features transform OpsCenter from a reporting, monitoring, and alerting tool into a product that can be used for administration purposes.NetBackup Search is an e-discovery tool which allows backup administrators to easily complete requests from the Legal department to find information stored on backup tapes in the event of litigation. The current process is very expensive and manual in nature. NetBackup Search UI is integrated into OpsCenter with means customer can quickly and easily search across their entire NetBackup environment.Now that we’ve covered the legal use case, let’s take a look at operational restores.  In today’s IT environment, companies are continually looking for way to reduce complexity and operational expenses. Operational Restore using OpsCenter is a great new feature that significantly reduces the time and complexity involved with restoring an accidentally deleted file or folder. Operational restore can find delete files/folder in virtual images as well as snapshots. Now, enable your front-line ticketing engineers to perform restore which will significantly reduce the load on the backup department.
• #40: OpsCenter 7.5 offers a restore user interface that is available to operators in a Web browser. Not only can you browse the NetBackup catalog as you have in the past, you can now search across multiple client and multiple NetBackup domains. That enables you to search and find the files or directories, even with limited information and service the restore request as quickly as possible. All of that is accomplished without any additional NetBackup infrastructure. Search results appear within seconds and you can refine or cancel them as needed to find the files fast.
• #44: Symantec offers flexibility and choice when it comes to deduplication. With NetBackup 7, deduplication is built in. That enables you the flexibility to choose where to deduplicate. What’s unique with NetBackup, is you can deduplicate everywhere – the source or target – from ONE SINGLE INTERFACE. No more having to cobble point solutions together. Our recommendation is to deduplicate as close to the source as possible – so in this instance, within the virtual machine itself. Why? Because network bandwidth is optimized as you are only sending unique data over the network. However, we also understand that as customers virtualize more and more business-critical applications – it may require deduplicating elsewhere as all server resources should be dedicated to running that particular business-critical application. In these situations – you need the flexibility to deduplicate off-host – either at the media server or via a target appliance. As deduplication is built in – NetBackup can deduplicate at the NetBackup media server ensuring that only unique data is ported off to disk or tape. If you prefer an appliance form factor – NetBackup integrates with third-party deduplication appliances via our OpenStorage API, or, offers our own NetBackup 5200 series deduplication appliance.