Dell PowerVault DL2000 - Manual (Page 2)

VMware Virtual Machine Protection
2 October 2008
The PowerVault DL2000– Powered by Symantec Backup Exec offers the industry‟s only fully inte-
grated backup-to-disk solution with software factory installed. Dell and Symantec have co-
developed this offering to give you easier management capabilities of the backup-to-disk environ-
ment. It‟s an ideal way for any IT department to achieve faster, more reliable backups and re-
stores. In addition, the appliance simplifies the backup and recovery of VMware based virtual
environments by integrating with VMware Virtual Center, VMware Consolidated Backup, and
VMware Converter.
Server virtualization is quickly becoming a standard technology in many data centers today. While
VMware significantly augments hardware utilization through server virtualization, VMware‟s Virtual
Infrastructure (ESX) 3 introduces new issues related to protecting and recovering virtual environ-
ments.
Data created and utilized in virtual machines is no less important than data located in a single
physical machine. This paper describes several approaches that can be used to back up VMware
ESX Server 3.x and its underlying components using Backup Exec for Windows Servers and the
Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure (AVVI). This paper also discusses the relative advantages
and disadvantages of each method.