In the fast-paced world of IT today, Automation is the king
of the hill when it comes to improving business productivity and service.
Why is Virtual Machine
Backup Automation needed?
Most businesses today are hosting their critical servers and
applications in virtualization environments for better resource utilization, easier manageability,
minimal downtime, and cost savings.
Protecting these virtual machines in an automated way is key
to ensuring business continuity.
Virtual Machine Backup
Automation Features
When
implementing a data protection solution, having automated processes, and
utilizing automation are key requirements for efficient virtual machine
backups.
Let's
look at some of the important virtual machine backup automation features:
- Automatic Scheduling for Backup, Replication, & Offsite
Copy Jobs
- Application-aware backup
- Transaction log truncation
- Retention Policy Settings
- Network Mapping and Re-IPing for VM Replication
- Automated Backup Verification
Automatic Scheduling
for Backup, Replication, & Offsite Copy Jobs
Scheduling
is a simple, yet powerful mechanism when looking at the important automation
features for virtual machine backup.
Being
able to schedule backup, replication, and offsite copy jobs, allows these
processes to take place automatically on a regular interval without any manual
intervention.
Additionally,
scheduling of backup, replication, and offsite copy jobs allows choosing
optimal schedules for your virtual machines. Each VM that you run has different
levels of criticality. Based on that, you have to choose the schedule to
minimize impact to any business-critical systems in production.
With
modern data protection solutions, you will be able to flexibly configure the
scheduling policies where the frequency starts from minutes and can be also
scheduled on an hourly/daily/weekly basis. This ensures having the lowest RPOs
that meet business SLAs.
Application-aware
Backup
Application-aware
processing is an important feature to look for in a data protection solution
when it comes to automating backup for applications.
What is
Application-aware processing? Why is it important?
Application-aware
processing involves the process of creating a consistent state of the
application running on your virtual machine to perform the backup.
VSS
APIs are used to properly quiesce the application writers and write the
application information that may exist in memory or any pending I/O writes to
disk. This ensures that the application is in a "consistent state".
This
is extremely critical when dealing with database applications such as Microsoft
Exchange or SQL Server.
Performing
an application-aware backup requires no additional steps to bring online after
a restore.
Downtime
of an application may sometimes cost businesses thousands of dollars each
minute if not much more. An automated approach to perform the
application-consistent backup of business-critical applications helps you meet
the business SLAs while saving time. This potentially saves your business a
tremendous amount of money.
Truncation of
transaction logs
The
ability to automatically truncate the transaction logs of the database
application after a successful backup is another important feature to look for
in the virtual machine backup automation.
A
data protection solution that can automatically perform the log truncation for
a database-driven application reduces the manual intervention needed for log
maintenance and alleviates any potential disk space issues as a result.
The
process to truncate logs works in tandem with the application-aware backup
functionality. By properly backing up an application such as a Microsoft
Exchange or SQL Server using the specific VSS writers for those applications,
the logs can also be properly truncated in a safe way and the disk space is
reclaimed.
Retention Policy
Settings
Retention Policies settings allow you to set and retain the
data as long as you need ranging from days to years. This will automatically
purge the data that is no longer needed, as it takes up unnecessary storage
space.
By automating retention, only the required number of
versions of virtual machines, files, or applications that are needed for
restoration or offsite copies can be easily maintained based on business SLAs.
Also, you can easily search and perform a point-in-time restore
of the required data in the event of data loss and can meet the lowest Recovery
Time Objectives (RTOs).
An automated approach to applying retention policies for
virtual machine backup lets you store only the data required for business
operations and meet compliance requirements while saving your disk space.
Network Mapping and
Re-IPing for VM Replication
Most
businesses use VM Replication to create a replica Virtual Machines in their DR
site and ensure high availability.
Since
the replicated virtual machine is an exact copy of the production virtual
machine, it will have the same network settings including the configured
vSwitch port group configuration.
When
you have a DR network that operates with different network subnets than
production networks, it is critically important to think about replicated
virtual machine network configuration, especially during failover. You will
need to match network configuration that exists in DR Site for your Replica
VMs.
The
ability to automate the reconfiguration of the network and vSwitch
configuration to match the network configuration that exists in the
secondary/DR site is an important feature for virtual machine
backup/replication automation.
Changing
IP addresses for the replica VM can also be a tedious job. You need to make
sure your data protection solution allows for automating or creating IP rules
for replicated VMs when virtual machines are performed failover. This can save
an enormous amount of time.
Automated Backup
Verification
The most important part of virtual machine backup is
verifying the recoverability of backup data.
Let's assume the case that you have backed up your virtual
machines successfully. But, how can you know if your backup data will recover
without any last-minute consequence like Restore Failed?
This is why it is mandatory to check whether your backups
are recoverable.
Verification of backup data needs to be performed on a
regular basis. However, manually verifying your backups every time is not
feasible. You need a data protection solution with which you can set up
automated verification. With this, you can rest assured that your backups are
in a recoverable state and you can data back in the way it was before.
Thoughts
By
utilizing the above-mentioned virtual machine backup automation features, you
can enable and ensure consistent, efficient, and error-free backup operations.
Using
an automated and comprehensive Backup & DR solution such as Vembu BDR Suite,
businesses can protect their data across virtual, physical, cloud workloads,
and SaaS applications.
Here
are the key features of Vembu BDR Suite for virtual machine backup:
- Agentless
Backup and Replication for VMware VMs
- Host/Cluster
level backup for Hyper-V VMs
- RTO,
RPO < 15 minutes
- Application-Aware
Backup with log Truncation
- Flexible
Scheduling and Retention Policies
- Automated
Backup Verification - Boot test, Mount test and Integrity test
- Instantly
restore backed up VMs within a few seconds
- Granularly recover
files/application items from the VM backup
Download the full-functionality 30-day free trial of
Vembu BDR Suite here.
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About the Author
Bhavani Shanmugam is a Product Analyst at Vembu
Technologies. As a part of the Product Management team, she strives to be the
voice of the customer and helps in building better products. She holds a
bachelor's degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering.