How To Backup With Ec Avamar

Transcription

1 BACKUP AND RECOVERY FOR MICROSOFT-BASED PRIVATE CLOUDS LEVERAGING THE EMC DATA PROTECTION SUITE A Detailed Review ABSTRACT This white paper highlights how IT environments which are increasingly implementing Microsoft-based infrastructure for private clouds can benefit from industry leading backup and recovery with an EMC Backup and Recovery Solution. High-Level feature descriptions and implementation scenarios are covered. Highlighting how these features are beneficial is the primary goal of this paper. January,

2 EMC WHITE PAPER TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS... 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY... 3 Challenges of Backup and Recovery in Microsoft Hyper-V Environments... 3 Audience... 3 INTRODUCTION... 4 EMC Data Protection Suite For Backup Overview... 4 EMC Avamar... 4 EMC NetWorker... 5 Integration with EMC Data Domain Deduplication Systems... 5 BENEFITS OF USING THE EMC DATA PROTECTION SUITE IN A MICROSOFT-BASED PRIVATE CLOUD ENVIRONMENT... 6 OPTIMIZED IMAGE BACKUP OF HYPER-V VIRTUAL MACHINES... 7 EMC Avamar and EMC NetWorker VHD Image Backup... 7 CONCLUSION... 9 REFERENCES

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Challenges of Backup and Recovery in Microsoft Hyper-V Environments Amongst all the benefits Microsoft s Hyper-V virtualization technology has brought us, such as faster virtual server deployment and easier management, new challenges have emerged. For example, server counts along with data growth have dramatically accelerated. When looking to protect these new rapidly growing server implementations, traditional backup methods clearly begin to bust at the seams. With increased server instance counts, approaching backup and recovery in this manner quickly makes backup windows already in place seem incredibly limiting. It s at this juncture where IT teams hit the proverbial brick wall and are forced to make a decision to make things work. Unfortunately, that decision comes at the cost of reducing the growth plans of the application server environment, nullifying the cost and power savings advantages, which are the reason for implementing a virtualized data center in the first place. Here are some key reasons why traditional backup methods limit virtualization growth: Relying on virtualized application server resources for backup load adversely affects application performance. o o Traditional backup methods can bottleneck Hyper-V shared resources such as CPU, memory, and network interfaces, that were originally sized and allocated for application transaction workloads. Even in situations where best practices recommend backup agents, lack of efficient backup scanning and data deduplication methods can exacerbate application server bottlenecks. Backup Media Consumption o Leveraging costly storage without any form of capacity optimization, and performing sometimes required multiple backups for various recovery purposes (DR, Operational File Recovery, etc.) consume more target media. Increased Business Risk o With backup windows quickly being outgrown when using inefficient backup processes, restore point objective (RPO) and restore time objective (RTO) service level agreements (SLAs) just simply can t be met. This puts the IT team, and more importantly the business at risk of monetary loss from down time and data loss. EMC s Data Protection Suite and protection storage address these challenges head on by first interfacing with the application hosting critical data and scanning it for backup in an intelligent and efficient manner. Secondly and equally important, transferring and storing that data in an efficient manner utilizing industry leading deduplication technology. All of the points discussed so far directly effect the capital IT expense equation. The EMC Data Protection Suite and its robust feature set, when integrating with important mission critical apps, also brings tremendous savings to the operational expense equation. This is achieved by providing visibility and control directly within the application being protected as well as a centralized management and reporting interface across applications and data types. It s this consistent visibility between the various IT owners that allows the business to avoid costly errors. Audience This white paper is intended for those Virtualization Administrators looking at deploying efficient backup solutions for enterprise wide Microsoft-based private cloud implementations. Knowledge of Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft Windows Azure Pack, and Windows Server 2012 and their overall architecture, terminology and methods are required. 3

4 INTRODUCTION EMC Data Protection Suite For Backup Overview The Data Protection Suite makes it easier than ever for organizations to access EMC's broad portfolio of backup, archive, and compliance software solutions. Like an IT survival kit, the Suite provides advantages for multiple types of users. It includes tier-based licensing options that are cost effective and designed to simplify management and deployment. The Suite enables fast, reliable deduplicated backup and recovery for many data types. In this paper we concentrate on protecting Microsoft-based private cloud environments, however the Suite can protect a wide array of data types: file systems, desktops/laptops, and other mission critical applications. The Suite also includes support for industry leading NAS as well as snapshot management and backup of EMC arrays. Access to EMC's best in class backup software portfolio within the Data Protection Suite For Backup includes EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker, and EMC Data Protection Advisor. These components offer tight integration with EMC's industry leading protection storage, EMC Data Domain, which delivers the time-critical performance and reliability required by enterprise companies. EMC Avamar Developed to solve the challenges associated with traditional backup, EMC Avamar deduplication backup software and system, equipped with integrated global, client-side data deduplication technology, provide fast, next-generation daily full backups for virtual environments, NAS systems, desktops/laptops, remote offices and business critical applications. EMC Avamar reduces the size of backup data at the client before it is transferred across the network and ultimately stored. Unlike traditional backup, Avamar delivers fast, daily full backups via existing IP networks, and makes recovery fast and easy with single-step restore. Figure 1: Avamar Deduplication Moves Less Data Avamar also deduplicates backup data globally across applications and sites worldwide to reduce the total required backup storage by up to 30x. As a result, Avamar provides the benefits of efficient long-term retention on disk while dramatically lowering capital and operating expenses including floor space, power, and cooling. Avamar backups can be quickly recovered in just one step eliminating the hassle of restoring the last good full and subsequent incremental backups to reach the desired recovery point. Avamar s intuitive interface allows desktop and laptop users to quickly recover their own data, reducing the burden on IT staff. In addition, Avamar s centralized web-based management and at-aglance dashboard view make it easy for administrators to protect hundreds of offices from a single location via existing networks. Data can be encrypted in flight and at rest for added security. Avamar software, similar to the other components in the Data Protection Suite, is integrated for multi-streaming backups to EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems for efficient and highly scalable backup of specific data types and applications, simplifying management and maximizing existing IT investments. 4

5 EMC NetWorker EMC NetWorker backup and recovery software centralizes, automates, and accelerates data backup and recovery. NetWorker delivers industry-leading performance and a wide range of data protection options to safeguard critical business data. Both physical and virtual environments can be protected with NetWorker. NetWorker simplifies data protection of Microsoft-based private cloud environments by providing centralized policy management, client configuration wizards, cluster support including Active/Active, as well as creating copies of the backups for off-site storage ensuring adherence to long term data retention requirements. EMC NetWorker provides client/application side deduplication when leveraging Data Domain Boost. In this scenario, Data Domain is configured as the backup target, and Deduplication occurs on the Hyper-V server. As discussed earlier, Avamar is also supported with NetWorker and provides similar deduplication advantages. Figure 2: EMC NetWorker Benefits Integration with EMC Data Domain Deduplication Systems Data Domain systems reduce the amount of disk storage required to retain and protect data by an average of 10-30x. This makes Data Domain systems a cost-effective alternative to comparable capacity tape solutions. Data Domain systems provide the industry s greatest scalability, performance, and efficiency in a single system, which allow customers to keep data online and onsite for longer retention periods than previously thought feasible. Figure 3: EMC Data Domain Deduplication Storage Systems More importantly, a Data Domain system is designed as the storage of last resort. With industry leading data integrity protection from the Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture, which ensures end-to-end data verification, continuous fault detection and self-healing, along with other resiliency technology, you can be assured that your data will be recoverable. EMC Data Domain Replicator software transfers only the deduplicated and compressed unique changes across an IP link to a remote site. This requires a fraction of the bandwidth, time, and cost compared to traditional replication methods and provides 5

6 customers leveraging Data Domain replication for off-site storage of EMC Avamar or EMC NetWorker backup savesets a faster Time-to-DR readiness. Integration of Data Domain together with the Data Protection Suite provides for features mentioned in this paper up to this point, but in addition provides a true end-to-end data protection solution sought out by many IT administrators today. Partnering industry leading protection storage with industry leading backup management and orchestration software is the recipe for a complete next-generation data protection solution. The enabler for this integration with both Avamar and NetWorker is EMC Data Domain Boost (DD Boost). DD Boost distributes parts of the deduplication process from the Data Domain system to the backup server or application client. By sending only unique data from the application client to the Data Domain system less LAN bandwidth is required, and application server CPU consumption is actually reduced. Looking specifically at the implementation with EMC Avamar, the integration with Data Domain provides the ability to selectively perform high-speed, scalable backups for specific data types, from an application server running an Avamar agent to a Data Domain system. With regards to Microsoftbased private cloud backups and storing backups of Hyper-V VHDs specifically, backups within Avamar can be directed Figure 4: EMC Avamar Integration with EMC Data Domain from the Hyper-V Backup Proxy Node directly to Data Domain bypassing a dual-hop data flow model typically seen with traditional backup software architecture. Integration with EMC NetWorker provides similar benefits and a few additional flexible deployment options. DD Boost can be leveraged within the NetWorker Storage Node to bring next generation backup efficiencies in a legacy backup deployment model. However, similar to the implementation in the EMC Avamar model, DD Boost is also included and can be utilized directly in the Application Client Modules. This implementation model is referred to as NetWorker Client Direct, and provides for efficient backup scanning and data transfers between the application server and the Data Domain system directly. As discussed, Data Domain Replicator software is a vital component of an overall data protection deployment strategy. With the integration of DD Boost with the EMC Data Protection Suite, no additional setup or maintenance Figure 5: EMC NetWorker Integration with EMC Data Domain configuration is required to incorporate data replication when using Data Domain systems. Once a Data Domain system is configured within the Avamar and NetWorker implementation, the software maintains all the replication and catalog awareness of off-site copies automatically. There is no requirement to separately provision replications policies or configurations on the Data Domain systems themselves. This centralized point of management within the solution is one of the key factors in making backup processing and orchestration more efficient for any size IT team. BENEFITS OF USING THE EMC DATA PROTECTION SUITE IN A MICROSOFT-BASED PRIVATE CLOUD ENVIRONMENT As mentioned earlier in this paper, traditional backup and recovery methods introduce limiting factors that involve reduced VM to hypervisor consolidation ratios and increased resource load on virtual application servers. The Microsoft Windows Hyper-V architecture was designed to allow much more consolidated and better utilization of physical compute and memory resources in physical servers. However, if you as the administrator can t protect the larger amount of servers, which can now be provisioned in a given footprint based on current backup windows, the investment made in Microsoft Hyper-V is moot. 6

7 When re-architecting the data center to increase or extend the use of a virtualization platform it often times is also the perfect opportunity to examine the backup and recovery services currently in place. Depending on the analysis done, it may be evident that switching to a more tightly integrated solution for backup and recovery of VM images will allow you to overcome limitations you find. Here are just some of the key points you should be looking for in your backup and recovery solution for Microsoftbased private clouds: No impact to Hyper-V servers during backups Looking for a backup application that tightly integrates within the Hyper-V Cluster and is aware of the current production state of all VHD images in a particular implementation is key. For example, does the backup application offer the ability to designate a separate proxy system that can offload the backup and recovery workload from production nodes servicing VM transactions? With the EMC Data Protection Suite, in a Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) implementation you have the flexibility of choosing and/or designating a proxy Hyper-V Node that will perform all backup processing, offloading the other Hyper-V nodes in the cluster. This proxy node architecture is also highly scalable with the ability to designate multiple proxy nodes in the cluster to process VM backups in parallel when working to protect a large scale environment in a short backup window. Simplified configuration and management Being able to quickly and easily deploy modules and agents into your production Hyper-V servers with newly introduced Client Configuration Wizards provides two benefits. It saves time at deployment without losing flexibility, and provides tight integration with features/functions normally only accessible via special setup and configuration. After initial analysis of your current implementation, and a few questions specific to your environment input into the wizard, the backup and recovery software modules required to integrate with Hyper-V VSS are validated and installed. This wizard based process of validation and simplified configuration can save hours of unwanted troubleshooting. Native VHD Format Image Backup The most essential factor for assuring that next generation Hyper-V environments can be protected in given backup windows, is the ability to protect each VM via an image based backup method rather than through an agent deployed internally on each individual VM. Understanding the VHD format allows the backup application to scan the VM files directly in the Hyper-V file system directly thus processing the source data more efficiently over legacy traditional backup methods, which involved combing through VM Guest OS file systems. It is this infrastructure specific intelligence and integration which allows backup software such as the EMC Data Protection Suite to truly realize the full potential of the Microsoft-based Private Cloud you are looking to deploy to take your IT operations to the next level. OPTIMIZED IMAGE BACKUP OF HYPER-V VIRTUAL MACHINES EMC Avamar and EMC NetWorker VHD Image Backup Now we will take a deeper look at the workflows and processes involved with how the components of the EMC Data Protection Suite (EMC Avamar and EMC NetWorker) go about protecting the more popular types of Microsoft-based Private Cloud Enviornments. Standalone Hyper-V Server Implementation: For smaller environments typically designated in the small to medium business market segments, a single Hyper-V Server hosting several VMs is most commonly implemented. For these smaller environments a single server is all that is required. Figure 6 shown to the left is a high-level diagram representation of how the EMC Data Protection Suite integrates into these types of implementations. With only one Hyper-V Server in the implementation, the EMC Data Protection Suite modules/plug-ins leveraging DD Boost are installed directly on the stand-alone Hyper-V 7 Figure 7: Stand-Alone Hyper-V Backup Architecture server.

8 Backup data can be sent directly to a Data Domain System leveraging efficient DD Boost technology mentioned previously, assuring lower network resource utilization as well as minimal impact to the Hyper-V server, which is also leveraged for production VM workloads. Given the integrated approach that the EMC Data Protection Suite For Backup employs, and its intelligent understanding of Hyper-V VSS APIs and VHD format, a complete VM backup can be performed while the VM is still online. More importantly the efficiencies in backup scanning introduced using this method assures minimal impact on the Hyper-V server s valuable compute and networking resources. Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) Hyper-V Implementation: A larger scale enterprise environment requires hundreds, if not thousands, of application servers to be deployed all supporting business critical data. This scale requires deployment of the Hyper-V foundation technology to be deployed in a cluster implementation to provide services at a large and highly available scale. Microsoft leverages Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) as the Virtual Machine storage mechanism for providing access to all VM files to multiple Hyper-V Servers. This allows for the ultimate in flexibility and redundancy allowing any Hyper-V Server to service compute and memory resources for any VM stored inside CSVs. Figure 8: Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) Hyper-V Backup Architecture Just like in the single server deployment scenario we covered in the previous section, EMC Data Protection Suite software modules are installed to directly interface with the Hyper-V VSS components for online backups. However, since we are dealing with several nodes working together in a cluster, it is not necessary to deploy the backup software components on all nodes. All that is required is that one or more proxy nodes are designated as backup nodes within the Hyper-V cluster. With the Data Protection Suite components installed on these proxy systems, it is now possible to scan ALL VMs that are accessible on the CSVs. EMC s Data Protection Suite components in this scenario offer unparalleled intelligence and integration in this type of environment. If we step back and take a look at how much more complex a cluster configuration can be, there is the possibility of any number of failure states. To put it more concretely, a single VM could be owned by any given Hyper-V server making backup policy management difficult. With the backup software technology included in the EMC Solution, from day to day, at the run time of backup, the plug-ins communicate current states and locations of VMs and provide complete protection coverage for ALL VMs regardless of which physical node that VM is running on. For those Microsoft-based private cloud implementations leveraging the latest Windows Server 2012 foundation, it is possible to designate multiple proxy node systems for backup, which allow for performance increases in environments hosting hundreds, if not thousands, of VMs. In this architecture, EMC Data Protection Suite software components are installed on multiple proxy nodes, and a single virtual Proxy Cluster Client is used within the Data Protection Suite software for consolidated management of backup and recovery for the entire private cloud. With this cluster aware capability built into the backup solution, not only can coordination occur between backup proxy nodes to assure complete protection, but you can also increase overall backup window performance by parallelizing backups of all VMs across multiple backup nodes. Not to mention similar to the single server implementation, all components also have built in DD Boost capability for efficient data transport to Data Domain. 8

9 CONCLUSION EMC Data Protection Suite delivers enhanced backup and recovery capabilities for Microsoft-based private clouds, including cluster aware and CSV intelligence, which is essentially a requirement that provides for easier management and performance for large-scale deployments. The EMC Data Protection Suite brings additional value and reduces the total cost of ownership by automatically load balancing the backup and restore of the multi-node cloud infrastructure jobs are directed to available proxy hosts based on a configurable preferred proxy host order list, as well as providing integrated industry leading deduplication. The EMC Data Protection Suite solution includes a comprehensive solution that brings benefits to Microsoft-based Private Cloud customers: No impact to Hyper-V servers during backup Simplified configuration and management Increased operational flexibility File Recovery from Image Backup Utilizes existing LAN/WAN IP bandwidth and virtual infrastructure Centralized Policy Management Integrated Deduplication with Data Domain systems Centralized Monitoring and Reporting Incremental Forever Backup Disaster Recovery and Replication 9

10 REFERENCES EMC Data Protection Suite Homepage (emc.com) EMC Avamar Product Page (emc.com) EMC NetWorker Product Page (emc.com) EMC Data Domain Product Page (emc.com) Demo - EMC NetWorker 8.1 Hyper-V Configuration Wizard NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications 2.4 Hyper-V CSV NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications 2.4 Hyper-V Overview and GLR Video Demo - Centralized Protection for Windows Azure Private Cloud VMs EMC Avamar Video Demo Centralized Protection for Windows Azure Private Cloud VMs EMC NetWorker 10

11 CONTACT US To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller or visit us at Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, and the RSA logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Published in the USA. White Paper H