Managing The VMware Data Protection Problem

The challenge of managing data protection in the virtualized environment is not only determining if a virtual machine is being protected but also if that VM is being over-protected. The typical VMware environment often has multiple backup applications, each protecting various parts and there’s a limited ability to get an overview of how well protected that environment is.

The VMware Data Protection Shortage

When VMware first started to move out of the evaluation labs and into production there was an immediate data protection problem, as most traditional backup applications didn’t support it very well. The common workaround was to treat a virtual machine as a physical machine and back it up with software installed inside the VM. But this strategy could cause performance problems when multiple VMs on the same host simultaneously kicked off their backup jobs.

While the legacy vendors slowly added support for VMware, several new vendors, like Vizioncore (now Quest Software) and Veeam, moved in to provide robust, native support, allowing for more efficient off-host backups. Now VMware has injected itself back into the equation offering its own snapshot technology and its own data protection appliance. In the meantime many of the legacy software vendors, while maybe not catching up to the likes of Quest and Veeam, are also closing the gap.

The VMware Data Protection Glut

At one point the server virtualization market had a lack of data protection solutions, but now suffers from what seems like an over abundance of these products. There are still differences between the abilities of each of these solutions and for some VMware data protection environments, the need for the multiple data protection applications can be justified.

The VMware Data Protection Blind Spot

The VMware administrator, storage and backup administrators need a central way to view which VMs are being protected, how they are being protected and how often they are being protected. Today there’s a blind spot when these administrators try to assess the status of these data protection efforts, and even their capabilities. While enterprise backup applications provide some level of reporting, they often don’t provide specific VM details. These reporting tools are also unable to provide a cross section view of what else is protecting the environment. Even the most standardized of VMware environments is likely to use VMware snapshots, for example, and most of these reporting tools will provide an integrated view of their backups and VMware Snapshots.

The VMware specific applications like Quest Software’s vRanger and Veeam Backup have focused primarily on solving the problem of backing up VM data, not on reporting that activity. This is typical for any young backup application. The applications that are considered enterprise-level today took years to evolve to the point which they offered any semblance of backup reporting and even today those functions are fairly basic.

The result of this VMware data protection blind spot is that it’s very difficult for administrators to confirm if a VM is being protected at all. This is, of course, especially challenging in the virtualized server world since unlike the physical world you don’t “see” a new piece of hardware being installed. VMs can be created and start generating production data long before a backup administrator knows they exist.

An equally problematic situation is the increased consumption of storage caused by over-protection, something that can happen when a system has two or more of the above applications installed. For example, it’s not unusual for a VM to have several active snapshots which are protected by a VMware-specific product and an enterprise backup application. Since most of these backups are directed at disk storage it’s likely that the storage administrator would notice them first and complain to the VMware administrator that they are using too much storage. At that point a long, manual and somewhat risky process starts as they try to decide which data protection steps can be eliminated so that disk capacity can be freed up.

Bocada Vision - VMware Blind Spot Detector

Many of today’s new cars have warning systems that will alert you if you are about to change lanes and there’s another car in your blind spot. Bocada Vision does much the same thing. Vision is a VMware focused data protection management solution from the same company that brought Bocada Prism to the enterprise data protection management market.

The main screen for Vision is the Healthcheck screen, which in a single view provides a graphical representation of all backups of supported applications (today Veeam, Quest Software, VMware Data Protection Appliance, VMware Snapshots and Symantec NetBackup). Veeam and Quest Software’s VMware replication products are also reported on.

This screen provides a quick summary of the success and failure of all the backup, snapshots and replication jobs in the environment. Users can drill down from these overviews to provide more detail about the status of each job.

The Healthcheck becomes the ideal location to start the day. A quick look each morning can determine if all the data protection processes completed successfully. If there is a problem the detail screen points the administrator in the right direction. Knowing the status of the VMware data protection process gives the administrator an excellent head start and it does so instantly. To create this type of detail without a product like Bocada Vision might take hours of manual investigation or very complex scripts to scan the environment each morning.

It is also important to note that in conjunction with seeing the job details Vision captures the virtual machine configuration so that if you do have to restore this backup the user knows how the VM was set up, thus saving time and avoiding recovery issues.

VM Protection Inventory

Another daily task that VMware and backup administrators struggle with is how to know which VMs are being protected and, thanks to the proliferation of data protection solutions, how to know which are being over-protected. Vision’s VM Protection Inventory report provides both of those answers, again in a simple, at-a-glance view.

VMs that are not protected are immediately visible by sorting the view to list VMs by data protection application. Any unprotected VMs will sort to the top of the list.

The VM Inventory Report will also show you which VMs are being over-protected. For example in the screenshot above we can see that VM “fedora14-1” is being protected by Veeam AND it has 62 active snapshots consuming 3.24TBs of disk space! Not only is this system being over-protected it’s consuming too much disk capacity.

Bocada Vision does more than just collect an inventory of the VM backup status, it also provides an insight into troubleshooting performance and managing capacity. The VM Backup Performance Report shows a graph of the data transfer rates by VM during the backup process. It can highlight for example, the worst performing clients. A typical cause of an under-performing client is that the host server is busy with another task, potentially another backup job, while the underperforming VM is running its backup job. Lack of performance can also be caused by too many snapshots being maintained for the given client. This report brings those problem areas into full view.

This performance data gives Vision-powered administrators an advantage over those relying on VMware alone, which provides little performance data overall and virtually no backup performance data.

Most if not all VMware backups, snapshots and replication jobs use some form of disk as their primary storage destination. This means that capacity management of the backup disk area, as well as balancing which backup area is receiving which jobs, becomes critical for the continued operation of the VMware data protection process.

The Most Utilized Data Stores Report allows the administrator to see at a glance which backup destinations are receiving the most activity and which are running out of disk capacity. As with everything else that Vision does this report provides a global view across backup applications, allowing the administration team to make storage performance and capacity decisions based on a single report.

Finally, the administration team needs to be able to report to their management on the status of the VMware data protection process. Additionally, management may want to have its own view that it can check every day. The VM Trends Report shows the status of VM snapshots, backups and replication over a specific timeframe (the last two weeks for example).

The report also provides some priority to the administrator’s daily routine. A VM that had a backup problem last night but was protected on the previous night might not be as high of a priority as a VM that had not been protecting in a few days.

Storage Swiss Take

Bocada Vision fills a gaping hole in the solid data protection strategy for the virtualized environment. The newer VM backup applications have not yet built robust data protection reporting features and the enterprise backup applications’ reporting functions are not VM savvy. This has led to either breakdowns in the data protection process or massive overcompensation, which wasted IT budget. Vision can provide peace of mind, both personal and corporate, and return hours of wasted administration time and stacks of IT dollars.