VMware Data Backup and Recovery Design Best Practices with Data Domain

Published by Data Domain on Jun 11, 2008

VMware sites create more storage to manage and protect than their physical counterparts. By making it much simpler to multiply servers, it also becomes more likely that their storage footprints will multiply. This is significantly visible in backing them up. For example:

- Multiple similar VM environments, times multiple storage image versions for protection and DR, can equal much larger storage than when servers were more expensive to clone.

- Restore requirements may include both full VMDK images as well as individual file restores to the Guest OS. Backing up both VMDK images and Guest OS files can offer optimum protection, but the data is highly redundant. With normal backup target storage, it would mean that many more tapes or that much more disk storage capacity.

Fortunately, with Data Domain systems as the target storage for VMware environment backup, those similar files would be deduplicated at high speed. All of the common data sequences are pooled to the smallest reasonable storage footprint, for on site protection and replication to a DR site.

When using Data Domain storage with well-understood best practices for backup and taking snapshots in VMware, a deployment can simplify management of consistent images. Once stored, the images are ready to restore, locally or, with optimized deduplicated replication, at a remote DR site. This paper describes best practices for managing these synergistic technologies together.