Data Protection and Recovery with VCB and vSphere VADP

Overview

Data Protection with vSphere VADP

Data Protection with vSphere VADP and VCB Combinations

Data Protection with VCB

Enabling vSphere VADP Support

Considerations for vSphere VADP Environments

Overview

The Virtual Server iDataAgent seamlessly integrates with VMware's built-in VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and vSphere vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) technologies. While the backup and restore process itself remains the same in either environment, the resources and operational time varies based on the technology used. The following sections describe how your backup and restore operations function in environments with each technology.

Data Protection with vSphere VADP

With the advent of the vSphere 4.x architecture, backup and restores can be performed using the vStorage API for Data Protection. This new API set provides significant performance improvements over VCB, including the following:

  • During backups, virtual machine data is not copied to a proxy server prior to moving to the storage media. Rather, the Virtual Server iDataAgent creates a snapshot of the virtual machine data directly from the datastore itself. The snapshot is then moved directly to the storage media without requiring any dedicated disk cache on the proxy server. This capability significantly improves backup speed, alleviates large amounts of resources on the proxy server, and allows for many more virtual machines to be backed up simultaneously.
  • Incremental backups are enhanced with Change Block Tracking (CBT), which quickly identifies only the data blocks on the virtual machine that have changed since the last backup. This replaces the need for the Virtual Server iDataAgent to scan the entire virtual machine with complex checksum calculations to determine what data has changed, which results in faster backup time.
  • Virtual machines are restored directly to the appropriate ESX Server and datastore without the need for staging on the proxy server with VMware Converter. This capability provides for much faster restores.

Overall, data protection and recovery in vSphere VADP environments is significantly faster and resource efficient than VCB environments. As such, it is recommended that data protection and recovery be performed with vSphere VADP whenever possible.

Requirements

To protect data in a vSphere VADP environment, the following requirements must be met:

Data Protection with vSphere VADP and VCB Combinations

The Virtual Server iDataAgent not only provides the ability to protect and recover data in VCB and vSphere-specific environments individually, but also environments wherein both technologies exist. To accomplish this, the proxy computer requires the following:

Once these components are configured, backup and restore operations will leverage between VCB and vSphere VADP as necessary.

Data Protection with VCB

For ESX Servers prior to version 4.x, protection and recovery of virtual machine data requires a proxy server to be used as a landing area for the data to be processed before being backed up or restored. In addition to ample disk space for copying the virtual machine data, the proxy server also requires the Virtual Server iDataAgent, VMware Consolidated Backup, and VMware Converter to be installed to process all the data prior to moving to the backup media or restore destination.

For backups at the disk level, VCB must first create a snapshot of the virtual machine and copy the blocks associated with the snapshot to the proxy server. The Virtual Server iDataAgent must then direct the data to the appropriate backup media. Similarly, for volume-level backups, VCB must create a snapshot of the virtual machine and subsequently mount the NTFS file system on the proxy server before being backed up to the appropriate backup media. Subsequent restores require the VMware Converter utility to stage the data before being reintroduced to the destination ESX Server.

Requirements

To protect data in a VCB environment, the following requirements must be met:

Enabling vSphere VADP Support

Support for vSphere VADP data protection and recovery can be enabled by performing the following steps:

  1. Ensure the Calypso Service Pack 4 software is installed on the server hosting the Virtual Server iDataAgent.

  2. Log on to the Maintenance Advantage web site and click the Downloads and Packages tab.

  3. Download the following software components:
  4. Apply both the Service Pack 4 March 2010 Update Pack and VMware vStorage VDDK components to the server hosting the Virtual Server iDataAgent.

    If installing VDDK on 64-bit operating systems, the following steps must be performed:

    1. VDDK 1.1.1 must first be installed on the proxy server to its default location.

      For example, C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit

    2. Create a new, similar path on the proxy computer.

      For example, C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit\

    3. Unzip the vddk64 folder to a temporary location. Once unzipped, copy the bin, lib, and plugins folders to the original install location created in Step 2. If prompted to overwrite the existing files and folders, select Yes.
    4. Create the following registry key:

      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit\InstallPath

      with the following value:

      C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit\

  5. Finally, enable the VStorageEnable registry key with the value set to 1.

Once the above steps are complete, you are able to perform backups and restores in vSphere VADP environments.

Considerations for vSphere VADP Environments

Consider the following for vSphere VADP environments:

Troubleshooting

Backup jobs may fail during Createsnapshot task due to (ESX IO frozen error)

Solution: Reinstall VMware tools on the virtual machine and rerun the backup.

Virtual machines may fail to back up due to a failure in downloading the .vmx configuration file

Solution: Ensure the vCenter credentials are also valid on the ESX Server. Users on both vCenter and ESX Server should have minimum privileges for backup and restore operations.

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