Dell PowerVault DL2000 - Manual (Page 5)

VMware Virtual Machine Protection
5 October 2008
As discussed earlier in this paper, while virtualization can provide enhanced server utilization and
flexibility, it also introduces unique backup and recovery challenges. There are several ways that
Backup Exec can be configured to safely protect VMware environments. Before planning your
backup and recovery processes of your virtual environment you should consider several
questions first, including:
Do you want to back up the individual virtual machines as normal clients for file level
and application level recovery or do you want back up the underlying .vmdk files on
which the virtual machines are based for complete volume or system level recovery
only?
While one virtual machine is being backed up, what is the performance impact on
additional virtual machines hosted on the same physical ESX 3 server during the
backup?
What are the relative advantages\disadvantages of each of these backup
techniques?
What are the relative advantages\disadvantages in terms of recovery of the ESX
server and the guest virtual machines?
How would you perform a disaster recovery of an entire Guest virtual machine?
Does a combination of these backup methods make sense for my environment?
Taking into account these issues, we discuss these methods in detail and provide a comparison
chart later in this paper.
ADDRESSING THE VMWARE VI3 BACKUP AND RECOVERY CHALLENGES