Features To Look For When Choosing A VM Backup Software
Posted on 06. Feb, 2010
Virtual Machine (VM) backup software backs up VM servers. VM servers are used extensively in running an online company or web store, indeed wherever a sizeable database drives information flow. Compared to physical servers VM servers make efficient use of available resources by allocating computing resources and storage according to need. This increases capacity, server performance and operational flexibility while requiring fewer administrators.
However, without a good backup strategy, all the cost savings derived from this virtualization will be lost to growing complexity and increasing capacity requirements. A good VM backup software is therefore essential to such a system. The features to expect from such software are:
• Linear scalability that allows a good number of concurrent backups even while operations are running without impacting these operations severely.
• Reliable change block tracking which notes the data blocks changed since the last backup.
• De-duplication will ensure that backup does not keep re-writing data it already has and this increases the speed of the backup operation.
• ESX-level backup which also tremendously helps the backup speed by backing-up changes down to 4KB data blocks instead of the whole VM environment every time.
• Fault tolerance through distributed architecture which makes sure the backup operation does not go down because of single points of failure.
• Self-healing data protection which verifies and repairs prior backups using data from the following backup.
• Secure virtual backup appliances which are deployed from templates and destroyed after each backup so that viruses and other security vulnerabilities cannot touch your backed-up data.
• Simple restores from tapes that should be a one-step restore of backups that brings the server back up quickly and completely.
• Graphical restore that lets a restore be done via the management GUI simply and effectively.
• Wholly independent implementation that does not carry hidden costs of additional hardware and software requirements.
• Automated backup capability that provides ‘hands-free’ data protection even from different sites.
• Intelligence that not only schedules backups but also capable of prioritizing different data source.
It is important to choose a VM backup software that has the above features implemented to ensure data protection and greater than 99% uptime. If your website sees a lot of traffic or handles a lot of requests, all of which are continually querying your database, it is imperative that you ensure backups of your data exist, are safe and that you can quickly effect a restore should the need arise.