Protect 500 Virtual Machines in 17 minutes: How Simpana® 9 Delivers Unparalleled Performance and Scalability for Even the Largest VM Environments
As data centers modernize based on virtualization technology, high server consolidation and high data density per physical host raise several challenges.
Data protection solutions that rely on simply moving data from one place to another cannot get the job done. This is because there is too much data to copy and not enough time, no matter how efficient the copy process.
Simpana® 9 software from CommVault is completely rewriting the book on how to protect virtual servers. Simpana SnapProtect™ for Virtual Server Agent (VSA) combines the power of the best in industry data management with the speed of hardware snapshot-based protection to deliver unmatched protection, recovery and management capabilities all in a single, unified data management solution, with minimal front end impact.
Simpana SnapProtect™ technology integrates with the snapshot engines in the underlying storage array to rapidly create fast, consistent and persistent hardware snapshots as protection copies. As a result you can:
- Create rapid protection copies for hundreds of virtual machines in minutes– minimal burden on production servers.
- Create multiple recovery points per day – minimizing the risk to your business.
- Be hardware independent – Simpana SnapProtect technology supports a wide variety of storage arrays, allowing you flexibility in your choice of storage.
How Does It Work?
When a data protection job runs, the Simpana VSA automatically detects the hardware device underlying the storage volumes on which the virtual machines are hosted. The virtual machines are quiesced to ensure consistency. Once all the VMs in the protection policy are queisced, the Simpana VSA simply executes a rapid hardware snapshot, using tools provided by the storage vendor. Simpana SnapProtect technology integrates with these tools so there is no scripting or special knowledge about the storage required. Once the hardware snapshot is created, providing a recovery copy, the virtual machines are unquiesced.
The SnapProtect for VSA feature is not available for Citrix XenServer. VMs on Citrix XenServer are protected using Xen Server APIs. See CommVault Books Online for more details.
Since creation of protection copies relies on hardware snapshots, this is a very fast operation. The majority of the time is spent in queiscing and unqueiscing the VMs for consistency. The hardware snapshot itself takes a few seconds.
Real world tests have shown that using this method 500 Virtual Machines were protected in approximately 17 minutes. Since the whole process takes only a few minutes, it is feasible to create multiple snapshots in a day, thus allowing multiple recovery points per day. Most users can create a protection copy every 4 hours. In the event of data corruption or loss, you can simply recover a copy from just a few hours ago. A traditional approach where you can only recover last night’s backup (given the amount of data being generated every hour) is now found to be unacceptable for most IT organizations in the modern data center.
Extending Beyond the Limitations of Hardware Snapshots
Most storage arrays have a limit on the number of snapshots that can be retained. The more snapshots you retain, more disk space is needed to maintain those snapshots, leading to sub-optimal usage of storage available. Most users that rely only on hardware snapshots are forced to make hard choices between retention, disk space consumption, and long term retention.
Simpana VSA provides the best of both worlds by allowing contents of selective snapshots to be copied to cost-effective storage. Users can create multiple snapshot-based recovery points each day. These snapshots are typically retained for 7-14 days on primary storage. Once a night, one of these snapshots is mounted to a Proxy Server and the contents are copied off to cost-effective storage for longer retention.
This secondary copy leverages best-in-class deduplication to minimize the amount of data transferred and stored. Moreover, since virtual machines were consistent when the snapshot was created, there is no need to quiesce the VMs again as the data is copied. As a result this copy process has no impact on virtual servers. Traditional backup methods, where the production virtual machine has to be quiesced for the duration of the backup, imposes additional overhead on the production environment for this period of time.
Simpana VSA uses native Virtualization Platform APIs (for instance, vStorage API for Data Protection on VMware) to read and copy data from the snapshot copies. VSA can also perform incremental backups (using Change Block Tracking on VMware) on the contents of the snapshot. Thus VSA, allows users to provide the same level of protection (full and incremental backups) as older methods but lets you take full advantage of modern protection methods (snapshots).
The contents of the virtual machine are cataloged as part of this operation, allowing the ability to perform granular restores directly from the secondary copy. Multiple copies can be created leveraging Simpana DASH Copy (or deduplication accelerated copy) for disaster recovery. Moreover, Simpana® software is the only product that allows this data to be written in deduplicated and encrypted form to cloud storage or to tape for multi-year retention.
Therefore, Simpana SnapProtect technology for virtual servers is able to drive all your protection, DR, recovery, and long term retention needs for virtual environments from a single policy and single solution. All of this can be achieved with minimal impact on the production server that lasts for only a few minutes at the most.
There are three key ingredients to making this work. First, we integrate with the hardware snapshot capabilities from all the major storage array vendors. With our integration, we can control the timing of snapshots and the retention period to give you multiple recovery points throughout a single day for your VMs. And we store the snapshots on secondary storage to ensure minimal impact to your production servers.
Second, Simpana software integrates with the major Virtualization Platform APIs. We support the latest data management capabilities from VMware vSphere, Microsoft HyperV, and Citrix XenServer. This enables our software to do things like queisce virtual machines prior to protection operations to ensure they are in an application consistent state, as well as automatically discover new VMs and other activities.
Finally, we pull these integration points into our award-winning unified data management platform. With this, we take the newly created snapshots and run deduplicated-enabled backups, indexing, archive, search, and storage resource management because these features are all integrated into the Simpana software solution. Data backed up to a retention or disaster recovery tier can reside on cost-effective commodity storage.