LOS ANGELES -- VMware Inc. Infrastructure 3 (VI3), announced this
summer, includes a feature called VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
that tackles the issue of backing up virtual machines, but many
users at this week's WMworld 2006 show are wary of how VCB will
alter their backup environment.
VCB enables the use of a proxy server to offload backups from
the host server, improving the performance of backup operations and
reducing overhead from the host, according to VMware. Backup
software providers CA Inc., CommVault Systems Inc., EMC Corp., IBM
Tivoli, Symantec Corp. and Vizioncore Inc. announced support for
VCB in September, so it's still early in the game as far as
deployments go.
"Thinking about changing our NetBackup environment to incorporate
VMware is very daunting," said John McCabe, manager of systems and
storage at Ernest & Young LLP. "We don't want to upset the
applecart … we've got schedules running hundreds of backup jobs,
and we can't just revolutionize it because of 50 VM guests."
His fears are echoed by other users, according to Brian Perry,
president and senior consultant of Perry Consulting LLC, a
privately owned VMware consulting firm. "Customers are worried
about how big of a change VCB is, and how it integrates into their
existing backup," he said.
Another question cropping up among users at the show was whether
to run VCB on a proxy server, and if it's possible to get away with
running it on the ESX console. "If we can get away with one less
box, that would be nice," said Charles Harvey, storage systems
administrator at Pacific Life Insurance Co. The company is about to
start migrating production database servers onto VMware. "Backup
becomes critical at this point," Harvey noted. He said he'd heard
it was possible to run the proxy software on the console itself,
but because it is susceptible to load, the general advice is to use
a standalone server. Also, running it on the console "is a security
risk, as there is too much access to the disk
LUNs [logical unit number]," he said.
Similarly, John Spanitz, senior systems administrator at Rodale
Inc., is toying with whether to run VCB on a proxy host or on the
ESX server. "There are a few options with VCB … it's not as easy as
we thought," he said. Rodale has 100 VMs on four hosts. The company
is also trying to figure out when to take a regular file-level
backup versus a snapshot. "We don't want them to overlap or run at
the same time," he said.
Meanwhile, Michael Tharp at Mainland Information Systems Ltd., a
VMware reseller in Canada, has found that heavy VMware users have
already found a solution to VMware backup with products like
esxRanger from Vizioncore. Moreover, to perform file-level
recovery, he said users must put agents back into each VM,
"which kind of takes the zing out of agentless backup."
Others note that the VCB feature is a first release and
naturally there are going to be some issues with it. "But it still
reduces backup licensing costs and backup overhead on the ESX
server, which is a major deal," said Chris Huss of New Age
Technologies Inc., a VMware reseller in Louisville, Ky.