White. Paper. EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock and Other Highly Virtualized Environments. January 2013

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1 White Paper EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock and Other Highly Virtualized Environments By Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst January 2013 This ESG White Paper was commissioned by EMC and is distributed under license from ESG.

2 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 2 Contents Executive Summary... 3 Introduction... 3 No More Headroom for Legacy Methods of Protecting Virtualized Servers... 4 How About Manageability and Assurance?... 5 What to Look for in Virtualization Protection... 5 Deduplication... 6 Application Awareness... 6 Private Cloud Considerations... 6 Monitoring and Management... 6 Multi-hypervisor Support... 6 Agility of Restoration... 7 EMC for Protecting Virtual Environments... 7 Client-side Optimization from Avamar... 7 Optimized Restore Using VMware CBT... 8 Efficient Storage Leveraging Data Domain Systems... 9 Considerations for a Converged Infrastructure The Bigger Truth All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at

3 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 3 Executive Summary Virtualization, although it enables a more agile and modern IT infrastructure, often creates new challenges in protecting the data and its underlying machines. This quandary is particularly true for virtualization converged infrastructures (VCIs) designed from the ground up to host dense populations of virtual machines such as the VCE Vblock System (referred to henceforth in this paper as Vblock). A Vblock is manufactured as a fully integrated infrastructure building block, or converged infrastructure. Each one includes servers and networks from Cisco, storage from EMC, and virtualization software from VMware. Vblocks are designed specifically to host virtual environments featuring high VM density and storage utilization. VCE advocates that its Vblock customers consider data protection engineered to support the high demands of this type of environment protection that includes the EMC Avamar solution (or Avamar plus Data Domain solutions) for backup and recovery, as well as EMC s VPLEX product and EMC RecoverPoint software for availability and business continuity. This paper describes the requirements for protecting highly virtualized environments, including an assessment of the solutions from EMC and a special consideration toward EMC s ability to protect VCI systems such as Vblock. Introduction ESG research has found that customers are moving rapidly to Vblock systems and other converged infrastructure to improve time to value, reduce operational and capital costs, and improve availability and agility. In fact, according to ESG s 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey, improve data backup and recovery tied with increased use of server virtualization as the number-one planned IT investment in 2012 (see Figure 1). 1 Figure 1. Top Ten IT Priorities for 2012 Which of the following would you consider to be your organization's most important IT priorities over the next months? (Percent of respondents, N=614, ten responses accepted) Improve data backup and recovery Increased use of server virtualization Major application deployments or upgrades Manage data growth Information security initiatives Business continuity/disaster recovery programs Data center consolidation Desktop virtualization Mobile workforce enablement Deploying a "private cloud" infrastructure 30% 30% 29% 27% 27% 25% 24% 23% 22% 22% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, Source: ESG Research Report, 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2012.

4 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 4 Although server virtualization has topped (or nearly topped) the list for the past few years, backup hasn t. However, with server virtualization becoming a more standard way to provision servers, the whole process is becoming arguably commoditized, and all of the challenges for using legacy backup solutions in a highly virtualized environment continue to be exacerbated. In some ways, virtualization has solved or at least significantly improved some aspects of data protection, including bare metal recovery and disaster recovery. It wasn t many years ago that a key challenge in protecting large, complex application servers was the daunting task of whole-server recovery. The concept of bare metal recovery (BMR) implied that one could restore a whole server installation to another machine, even if the underlying hardware varied. Today, with virtualization becoming mainstream, BMR operations occur by leveraging VMware image-based recovery methods. In fact, leveraging a VMware backup solution such as EMC Avamar will allow you to perform a BMR operation in minutes, versus the usual hours associated with legacy BMR procedures. Similarly, disaster recovery (DR) capabilities are open to a much broader range of organizations because those virtualized servers now can be replicated across sites and powered up in case of crisis. In fact, as cloud-based services continue to prove their viability beyond early adopters, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) will continue to grow in popularity, namely, the VMs are replicated to a cloud provider and are launched without the need to maintain a second data center and an underlying virtualization infrastructure at that redundant site. Aspects of data protection are improved through virtualization. But challenges also plague virtualized environments of all sizes challenges related namely to discovery and proliferation of virtualized resources. The fact is, it is too easy to create new virtual machines (VMs); they are so easy to create but so hard to protect adequately. Simply clicking a mouse a few times to provision a new machine can actually create multiple GBs of storage consumed on the production server, often by OS and application binaries that appear on numerous other servers in the same infrastructure. And for many organizations that rely on legacy backup mechanisms, 1GB of new (albeit redundant) production data could result in four to six times that space within the disk-based backup solution. No More Headroom for Legacy Methods of Protecting Virtualized Servers Beyond the concern of VM server sprawl and its associated effect on production and backup storage, the greater concern for protecting highly virtualized environments is the impact that the backup function itself has on the environment. Figure 2 shows the CPU and storage patterns of a physical server (on the left), with sporadic spikes in demand but with an appreciable amount of available resources. This situation is due to most physical servers being significantly underutilized. Figure 2. Available Compute and Storage I/O for Backups Comparing Physical Servers and Virtualization Hosts

5 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 5 But consolidation often is a primary initial goal of server virtualization. The right side of Figure 2 shows the aggregated resource demands of multiple VMs that share a single host. This visualization is important when one thinks about the default behavior of legacy backup agents, which effectively tell the production server to give me all of your data, as fast as you can, which equates to a high increase in demand for CPU and storage I/O. The reality is that a physical server usually has those resources to spare. A virtualized host does not. Moreover, any additional CPU or storage I/O demand on any VM has the potential to affect the underlying host platform and storage array as well as all of the other VMs that coexist on that host. How About Manageability and Assurance? Virtualization enables some compelling supportability benefits by not forcing IT to put multiple applications on one physical server; single-function virtualized servers are easier to support. That benefit is good for the application owner and the help desk. But it complicates the protection of virtual environments through further VM sprawl, as well as requiring more data to be deduplicated, affecting manageability overall, and creating more instances of the OS and applications to monitor and maintain. And those manageability challenges double again based on how those new machines will be managed in a very dense consolidation of virtualized servers per hypervisor host. Beyond management itself, fundamental data protection tasks such as ensuring recoverability of data or troubleshooting of backup or recovery tasks become harder in virtualized environments (see Figure 3). 2 Figure 3. Top Five Challenges When Protecting Virtual Environments Which of the following would you characterize as challenges for protecting your organization s virtual server environment? Which would you consider to be your organization s primary virtual server data protection challenge? (Percent of respondents, N=183) Recoverability of data Response time for troubleshooting backup failures 13% 19% 39% 33% Primary virtual server data protection challenge Validating recovery success Validating backup success Identifying factors impacting the performance of backup operations (i.e., failed drive, network bandwidth contention, etc.) 9% 8% 8% 27% 32% 35% All virtual server data protection challenges What to Look for in Virtualization Protection 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, As Figure 3 shows, even basic support tasks become arduous in virtualized infrastructures. For that reason, organizations should look for fresh solutions that can protect highly virtualized environments better. 3 An optimized 2 Source: ESG Research Survey, Virtual Server Data Protection, September Source: ESG Solution Brief, What to Look for in Virtualization Protection, August 2012.

6 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 6 virtualization protection solution should address deduplication, application awareness, private cloud characteristics, monitoring and management, hypervisor support, and faster restore. Deduplication Easy deployment causes VM sprawl and alarming storage consumption. Deduplication should be implemented as close to the production workload (source side) as possible. In virtualized environments, this effort includes employing Changed Block Tracking (CBT) within VMware, file system filtering or use of the NTFS Journal in Windows environments, and a form of client-side deduplication to reduce VM sprawl s storage/network impact. Backend storage (often supporting multiple backup engines) should be globally deduplicated. Additionally, consider that some dedupe mechanisms work: Only at the virtual hard disk (VHD or VMDK) level: You may free each VMDK of copies, but 500 VMs still equate to 500 VMDKs, regardless of the duplication of operating systems and application binaries. At a volume level: All VHDs or VMDKs sharing a SAN LUN might be deduplicated to the sum of their unique parts, but only within that LUN. Of course, others deduplicate across all protected LUNs that go to a certain backup server. Across multiple backup servers and myriad production VMs protected by them, or they deduplicate to optimize physical files/objects with the versions of those files or objects within VMs. Application Awareness Most hypervisors provide crash- or application-consistent backups. But they don t all enable post-process handling or granular recovery of virtualized applications the same way. Transactional applications must do maintenance only after a successful backup. Good backup solutions ensure that it occurs, either through the hypervisor and embedded guest tools, or through an additional agent or other injected executable module. Private Cloud Considerations Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach in which backup servers automatically apply identical protection policies to all VMs as they are created, mature private cloud architectures integrate with their backup processes when new services (and underlying VMs) are provisioned. It s crucial that the backup solution know how to back up VMs in accordance with various service-level and retention requirements. In a private cloud, the goal (not attainable yet for many) is that the backup solution is intelligently notified of the SLAs and therefore knows what protection approaches to apply. Monitoring and Management ESG research reveals that IT teams are diversifying their data protection toolsets, but that doesn t mean they must deal with multiple management and monitoring interfaces/solutions. A few multi-vendor monitoring solutions exist, with more unification potentially coming offering a single pane of glass for IT. Multi-hypervisor Support VMware enjoys a position of strength in enterprise adoption, but many people consider Microsoft and Citrix as viable alternatives. Thus, it s now easier for IT purchasing decision makers to just consider the cost per socket (VM or host) as well as deployment differentiators such as manageability or integrate-ability. For example, Microsoft shops may run Windows Server OS with System Center management and applications such as SQL Server and Exchange, but they ll do so on VMware ESX (or perhaps Citrix) as often as Microsoft Hyper-V. Today s management stacks may abstract hypervisor-specific details and backup solutions should account for that fact.

7 Agility of Restoration White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 7 Backup doesn t matter if you can t restore fast. Some backup solutions capture application metadata or do similar indexing. It s critical to rapid restore, but it takes extra effort after a backup may be complete. Almost every vendor can restore whole VMs and pluck files from them, but not all perform fast restore of item-level objects such as a single message. The keys to restoring virtualized data are the same as the keys to restoring physical data: How fast can it be restored, and how granular can the restoration be? EMC for Protecting Virtual Environments It should come as no surprise that VMware parent company EMC has made huge investments in a data protection portfolio that is optimized for protecting virtual environments particularly related to the better-together scenario: servers virtualized with VMware and protected by EMC Avamar and Data Domain products. Even before EMC acquired Data Domain, it had Avamar, a protection solution designed and optimized for protecting highly virtualized infrastructures: Avamar is deduplication backup software and a purpose-built backup appliance that uses a grid architecture of controllers and storage nodes to provide the scalability necessary for protecting a vast number of VMs at once. By interoperating with VMware s CBT, Avamar s variable-length client-side deduplication can discern what partial file chunks are unique and therefore require new backups. This advantage reduces the amount of VM data being protected, which further increases the scale of the virtualized infrastructures that Avamar can support. Avamar also leverages CBT on recovery instead of just during backups. By determining the difference between the current state of the VM and its last backup, Avamar only needs to recover those specific blocks. This capability can dramatically reduce VM restore time compared with restoring the entire VM. All of those capabilities became even better after EMC acquired Data Domain in mid Through EMC s DD Boost functionality, Avamar s virtualization-optimized deduplication enabled EMC to offer an enterprise-scalable deduplication software solution (Avamar) and in-line deduplication storage platform solution (Data Domain System) for protecting virtualized environments of all sizes. The combination of the two EMC data protection offerings has applicable capabilities that should appeal to VMware customers, including those running on VCE Vblock. Client-side Optimization from Avamar As discussed earlier, a key requirement for modern virtualization protection solutions is to architecturally limit potential impacts, not only those affecting the virtualized server being protected, but also those affecting the underlying host/storage and the neighboring virtual machines. To accomplish that objective, Avamar s deduplication logic runs on the client side (within a proxy VM on a nearby ESX host). VMware s own CBT ensures that only the changed areas of a VM are submitted for backup, and Avamar s deduplication mechanism identifies only those variable-length fragments that are unique across VMs thus minimizing host/storage impact and ensuring that the neighboring VMs are unscathed during backups. If it weren t for these types of proactive reduction technologies, using a legacy approach to back up a single VM could consume all of the free CPU cycles and storage I/O capacity that the host had (refer to Figure 2), resulting in a performance impact across all of the other virtualized machines on that host. As one recent ESG virtualization survey revealed: The average host currently has about 16 virtual machines on it. The survey respondents anticipated that the number will rise to 26 VMs by the same time next year. As VM density continues to grow, the importance of client-side optimizations when protecting virtual infrastructures becomes even more pressing.

8 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 8 Also notable considering the growing density of VMs per host is an Avamar feature called Proxy Load Balancing, which enables multiple Avamar proxy servers (virtual machines) to distribute backup jobs automatically across the cluster for optimum performance and minimal impact to the host processor or storage solution (see Figure 4). Figure 4. EMC Avamar s Universal Proxy Server Load Balancing As Figure 4 shows, Avamar dynamically assigns VMware proxies (shown as red and green VMs) at the time of backup by automatically finding the least busy proxy to which to assign the backup job, in a round-robin approach. The proxy-to-host-to-vm relationship is adaptive, so performance can be sustained without impact to the production environment as seen in the diagram, where each of the Avamar proxy VMs is backing up servers from multiple hypervisor hosts. Optimized Restore Using VMware CBT The most significant reason to perform backups is to enable recovery quickly and reliably. Avamar optimizes VMware recovery, specifically leveraging VMware s CBT functionality during restore as well as backups. A bit of background: VMware presents the changed blocks on a daily basis to Avamar. Avamar then uses its variable-length deduplication to identify the unique segments from those blocks, which it compresses, encrypts, and sends to the Avamar Data Store and Data Domain (see Figure 5). Figure 5. Avamar Backups Using VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) Figure 5 shows VMware first providing the changes within a VM, via CBT, to the Avamar proxy VM. Then, the proxy VM identifies the unique fragments that are not already stored within the EMC storage solution, and it sends just those fragments. This is an ideal model for backing up virtual machines, yet many virtualization protection solutions do not leverage the same capabilities for VM restoration.

9 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 9 Figure 6 shows a standard VM restore (top), which requires that the entire virtual machine be recovered. This process would take quite some time perhaps an hour or more. Alternatively, Avamar purports to understand the current state of the VM, so by comparing the VM with its last backup, Avamar can determine which blocks are required to restore that VM. A CBT-based restore (bottom) has the potential to be notably faster for scenarios with limited differences between the current VM and its previously good state; EMC claims a benefit averaging 30 times faster than restoring an entire VM. Figure 6. Comparing Typical (Whole) VM Restores to Restores Using CBT Efficient Storage Leveraging Data Domain Systems Avamar is tightly integrated with Data Domain systems through Data Domain Boost (DD Boost) software. One may choose to send high-change workloads to the Data Domain system to leverage its inline variable-length deduplication, which provides a high ingest rate and scalability up to 570TB (in the DD990 system). From a VMware backup perspective, Avamar retrieves changed blocks through the vstorage API for Data Protection (VADP) and passes them to DD Boost for deduplication. On the flip side, when one needs to recover a VM, Avamar requests the specific blocks through DD Boost, which retrieves them from the Data Domain system. Thus, Changed Block Restore speeds recovery no matter where the data is stored either in the Avamar Data Store or the Data Domain system (see Figure 6). Figure 7. Avamar Manages Backup and Recovery, Leveraging Data Domain for High-change-rate Workloads

10 White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 10 Another key area when considering the Vblock involves having a unified management experience with the data protection solution. In this case, much Avamar management can be streamlined through the use of VMware vcenter, and an appreciable amount of control and monitoring of the Data Domain systems is accessible from the Avamar management console (see Figure 8). 4 Figure 8. Configuring Data Domain Within Avamar Management Console Considerations for a Converged Infrastructure In reality, the problems discussed in this paper are challenges to VMware environments of all sizes, with recommended guidance centering on carefully architecting a protection solution that recognizes the unique performance criteria and considerations of a highly virtualized environment. And, as stated earlier, it should come as no surprise that VMware parent company EMC has invested a great deal of effort to optimize its data protection portfolio for virtualized infrastructures. Although EMC earned its reputation for supporting the large enterprise, newer products such as EMC Avamar Business Edition and the EMC Data Domain DD160 showcase EMC s efforts to bring high-performance enterprise technologies to midsize businesses as well, thus making the capabilities discussed here available to a larger market. Another audience that EMC is focused on (besides simply scale from enterprises to midmarkets) is converged infrastructure. Certainly, many IT organizations purchase generic servers from one vendor, storage solutions from another, and networking from a third. Then, they assemble their own fabric, and finally, they layer on the hypervisor and management tiers. But for other IT organizations, it simply makes more sense to acquire pre-configured building blocks that include pre-assembled, pre-connected, pre-installed, and pre-prepared compute/storage/networking. 4 Source: ESG Lab Validation Report, EMC Avamar 6.0, June 2011.

11 The Bigger Truth White Paper: EMC Backup Solutions for VCE Vblock Systems and Highly Virtualized Environments 11 Yesterday s solutions are usually unable to solve today s problems. That adage certainly holds true in the evolving world of virtualization protection. The more evolved your approach to virtualization is, the less applicable your legacy backup solutions will likely be. Would you put all your eggs in one basket if you couldn t protect that basket? Of course you wouldn t. Although virtualization fabrics are durable architectures, VMs can be considered as fragile as eggs when an impactful backup solution is implemented and used. Would you put all your eggs in one basket if the basket knew how to protect itself? Of course you would. Between native resiliency technologies in your virtualization infrastructure, along with the virtualization-optimized EMC data protection solutions, those eggs won t be scrambled and neither will the production servers. As indicated in earlier ESG research, server virtualization will continue to be the standard for IT delivery, with VM density being a function of hardware capacity, and the rate of change continuing to accelerate as physical servers end their lifecycles and are replaced by a fraction of a new server host. In the meantime, data protection, which was hardly ever solved in a physical server world, has found new struggles and opportunities in the highly virtualized infrastructures of tomorrow but only for those backup solutions that are truly designed to be effective without being impactful. There is an old saying that too many cooks spoil the soup, and yet some organizations do operate with such a fragmented virtualization infrastructure and support/backup environment that their soup is spoiled. But if your hypervisor is from VMware, your computing from Cisco, and your storage from EMC, then recognize that a couple of the cooks are in your kitchen already, and ask yourself if your virtualization soup would perhaps be best served by those same cooks backup solution (and some warm bread).

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