Top 5 Challenges for Virtual Server Data Protection

Posted on by jhcruzr

Data Protection and the Drive to Virtualization

The benefits of server virtualization are compelling and are driving the transition to large-scale virtual server deployments. From cost savings recognized through server consolidation or business flexibility and agility inherent in the emergent private and public cloud architectures, virtualization technologies are rapidly
becoming a cornerstone of the modern data center.

However, the lure of virtual server deployments is having unintended consequences for data storage and data protection. The consolidation of physical servers and networking is resulting in a massively converged IT
infrastructure where already limited resources are being made even more scarce. Typical server consolidation ratios of 10 to 1 mean there are a fraction of the resources there once were for even routine IT management tasks like backup and recovery. In addition to fewer resources, massive data growth coupled with the expanding number of virtual machines is leading to an ever larger and more consolidated amount of data that must be managed and protected. The benefits of virtual servers in terms of cost savings, application flexibility and uptime are now driving customers to deploy more critical applications within a virtual machine context. These critical applications come with the most demanding SLAs for application uptime, granular recovery points, and rapid recovery times.

With this shift to virtualized data centers and round the clock operations, there is a need to rethink the traditional data protection techniques. Data protection and data recovery must have minimal front end impact and cannot exclusively rely on the legacy methods of streaming copying data from the production to the
backend. A modern, effective solution minimizes the load on production systems, reduces administrative effort, enhances data protection and recovery, eases the transition to a virtualized data center, and will enable cloud-based options when they are desired.

The Challenges of Virtual Server Data Protection

1 Exploding Backup Windows
High server consolidation and high virtual machine (VM) density concentrates data ownership to a small number of physical servers with most resources dedicated for production workloads. There are few resources, if any, left for traditional management tasks, such as backup, which moves data over a network during a fixed window. In this new world of consolidated and virtualized environments, storage and backup teams are being asked to protect large and growing data stores with a fraction of the compute, network and storage resources and to do so in less time.

As server resources continue to consolidate and virtual environments become more concentrated, the amount of data owned by virtual machines is skyrocketing. This massive growth in the amount of data to be owned, managed and protected by the virtual environment is compounding what is already an untenable situation when using a traditional streaming backup approach. Cases are emerging where a successful backup of multi-terabyte data stores using a traditional streamed backup approach is exceeding a 24-hour window,
far in excess of what the modern data center requires.

Every virtual machine is essentially a set of large files (VMDKs in a VMware context). These large files are stored on LUNs known as Datastores. Datastores can be configured on iSCSI or Fiber Channel block storage volumes or on NFS volumes. Traditional data protection techniques such as VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP), or VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) rely on an external agent to protect VMDK files associated with virtual servers. Typical steps are as follows:

  • Queisce virtual servers to get a consistent set of VM image files.
  • Use the VADP enabled agent to read the VM image files from the Datastores.
  • Copy the image files to a backup disk target.
  • Release the Virtual Servers for normal operations.

While VADP brings much efficiency to this process, it is still a streaming method that moves the image files from the datastore to backup disk for protection. For environments with ever shrinking backup windows, there is simply not enough time or bandwidth to move all the VM data. Even if the infrastructure is available to copy all this data, it places a tremendous burden on the datastores as the data is read.

2 Unprotected Virtual Machine Data
The ease of deploying new VMs leads to a virtual machine sprawl, making it tedious and time-consuming for administrators to keep track of new virtual machines and to ensure correct data protection and retention policies are applied to them. There is a major risk that important virtual machines may be created and never backed-up. Today, many administrators spend a significant part of their day tracking down new VMs and manually applying data protection policies. In the modern data center with hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines, this manual approach to ensuring VM protection policies is simply an unacceptable solution.

3 Lack of Application Integration
As more and more mission critical applications—like SQL, Exchange and Oracle—are virtualized, it is necessary to provide the same level of protection and recovery capabilities for these applications as they had in a purely physical server setting, while staying within the constraints imposed by a highly consolidated, virtualized environment. The modern data center now demands data protection solutions that deliver a level of application and virtualization platform awareness in order to provide concerted backup and restore capabilities that will ensure maximum uptime of these critical applications.

4 Inadequate Recovery Points
With high data growth and change rate, relying on last night’s backup for recovery is no longer sufficient. In addition, as organizations deploy more critical applications within a virtual server context, they are demanding Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) of hours. In other words, it is necessary to be able to recover to a few hours ago, not to last night’s backup, in order to minimize data loss and the impact to the organization as a result of any disruption. Creating frequent recovery points without impacting production activity is a huge challenge.

5 Lack of Restore Granularity
In order to further accelerate restores, organizations require an integrated approach to restoring data granularity at the volume, file or application object level. The ability to restore an individual e-mail or file from within a virtual machine datastore is critical for ensuring application uptime and for meeting availability and uptime SLAs. Traditional approaches which require remounting an entire virtual machine datastore (such as a VMDK) and searching through the contents to find a single user e-mail is simply too time-consuming and resource intensive to be a workable solution. Newer approaches are currently being introduced that enable file and object level restoration, however, they may require a second pass in order to generate that granular catalog. This unnecessarily adds additional processing time and consequent risk into the data protection process. A solution is needed that delivers granular restore options down to the file or object level and does so from  a single pass backup operation.

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