Leveraging Virtualization for BAR
Partnership for Emergency Planning, 2010
Description
Server virtualization has decoupled server operating systems and
applications from their traditional hardware and platforms. Where
appropriate, virtualization has shown significant opportunities to
enhance operations and management of servers and applications. The
virtualization layer of the server stack is a perfect place to tackle the
challenges of backups and recovery. We will discuss some
technologies that are bringing interesting new solutions for how to
protect your server configuration and data and to ease recovery in the
event of disaster or data loss.
About Me...
Dominic Romeo
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14 years in IT
Senior Systems Engineer out of Omaha, NE
9 years with CoSentry
EMC storage, Cisco networking, Vmware vSphere
Managing multiple ESX clusters
• In our data centers: KC, Sioux Falls, Omaha
• In other data centers: Australia, UK
– Experience with multiple backup technologies for VMs
Who is CoSentry?
• Four Regional Facilities
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35,000 Sq.Ft. Existing Raised Floor
N+1 Power and Cooling Infrastructure
PCI DSS v1.2 Physical Security Compliant
SAS 70 Type II Certified
Service Provider Class Network Infrastructure
Over 20 Gbps of Bandwidth for Internet Transit
14 Carriers for TDM, Ethernet, and Optical Circuits
Colocation, Disaster Recovery Facilities and Services,
Managed Services including Virtual Server Resources
and Managed Tape or Disk Backups and Recovery
Agenda
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Disasters Happen
Technologies to Have Your Eye On
Backups
Resources for Recovery
Q&A
Disasters Happen
Bad things happen, even to good data centers...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M_QTBENR1Q#t=1m50s
Man-Made Disasters
• Most IT disasters are man-made
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System misconfiguration
Unscheduled maintenance
Cabling or physical server disturbance
Voice or data network provider issues
Limited capacities during peak demand
Power issues
Technologies to Have Your Eye On
• Hypervisor
– VMware vSphere
• De-Duplication
– As a general technology and some specific
implementations
• Image Level Backups that Also Support
Individual File Restore
• Cloud Resources for Recovery
VMware vSphere
• ESXi is here
– No more Service Console on my
ESX host
– Will this affect my VM backup
strategy?
– Some backup current technologies
depend on the hooks they have at
the Service Console level of ESX
• VMware adding features
like Data Recovery and
vStorage APIs
Source: VMware
De-Duplication
Identification of unique chunks in a set of data, enabling
the elimination of duplicates when stored or moved.
Some major benefits:
1. Reduces bandwidth
Data Set 1
De-duplication
Data Set 2
2. Shrinks backup windows
3. Reduces server load
Data Set 3
4. Every backup is a “full”
Source: EMC
Image Level Backups
• VMDKs are the heart of your VMs
• Moving your server is as simple as moving a file
around
• Backup the VMDK and VMX and you have all
you need to recovery you server and data
• Snapshots
• Databases and other applications may require
extra hoops be jumped through
Simplify Individual File Recovery
Most recovery
operations are not for
a full-blown server
restore. Make sure
your solution can also
allow for very easy
recovery of individual
files with some
assurances of access
control.
You should need a
disaster declaration to
just recover a few
Word docs or emails.
Cloud Resources
• The “cloud” is stuff you don’t want to care about
– CPU, RAM, Disk, and other commodities you need to
run your servers
• You cloud provider cares
• How do you bring your data and workloads up
on that providers cloud
• Is it easy or is there real heavy lifting to still be
done?
Backup Challenges
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Backup infrastructure management
Agent installation headaches and licensing
Multiple concurrent backup solutions
Backup software maintenance
Network and resource utilization
Verifying backups
Testing restores
Remote offices
Tape cost
Tape count growth
Tape drive maintenance
Offsite tape rotations
Archiving
Source: EMC
Backup and Recovery Goals
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Reduce backup and restore costs
Decrease the time it takes to run backups
Reduce or remove challenges of tape backups
Reduce or remove ongoing maintenance costs
Efficiently backup remote locations
Centralize and ease management
Enforce backups without causing undue system strain
Simplify restores
Meet RPO and RTO requirements
Provide increased ability to verify backups and do non-impacting
restores to test recovery strategy
Avamar Overview
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Complete EMC backup and recovery product
– Avamar backup and recovery software with integrated
source-based global data de-duplication
– EMC-certified hardware
Built-in high availability
– Avamar RAIN technology
– Spare node
– RAID on each node
– Redundant power distribution
Simplifies:
– Purchase (hardware and software together)
– Deployment and Service (single vendor support)
– Capacity Expansion (add nodes)
VMware Data Recovery Overview
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VMware’s appliance-based solution
Image and file level restores
De-duplication as VM backup is stored
Simplifies:
– Purchase
– Management
– On-going backup operations
Requires:
– vCenter
– Certain level of vSphere licensing
– Additional storage
CoSentry Managed Disk Backup
• Client data is protected on disk (not tape)
• Uses EMC Avamar technology with a dash of CoSentry networks,
facilities, and monitoring/management
• Scale from 100GB to 40TB
• Full RAIN implementation
• No additional fees for agents (OS, DB, Mail)
• No Cap-Ex, just an Op-Ex for actual data that is protected
• Clients can store their data on multiple grids in different data centers
and do extended retention
• Clients can replicate their existing Avamar node/grid to CoSentry
• Can eliminate need for tape
CoSentry Virtual Server Resources
The stuff in the “Cloud”
VMware vSphere
Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs
Lots and lots of RAM
EMC Clariion CX4 SAN
Cisco switches and routers
Cisco firewalls and IPS
Enterprise speed and
redundancy
• N+1 ESX host capacity
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Source: VMware
Benefits of Cloud VM Resources
• Right-size your VM for DR or production
– Quickly and painlessly resize if demands change
– Match disk space with what you are protecting
• Right-size your DR bills
– Reserved resources are a fraction of the cost of building your
own VM cluster, network, and SAN for DR
– Pay as little as 1/5th of the cost of doing it yourself
• Know that server resources will be there when you need
them the most
– Let the provider worry about it
Benefits of Cloud VM Resources
• It saves you green
– For approximately 20% of the cost to own resources,
you can reserve them and spin up at time of need
• It is green
– Lights out when not in use but spins up quickly
• You can actually test it without disturbing your
production environments
• Reduces strain on your IT resources
Disaster Recovery
• Protect all my data
• Do you still have some
physical servers?
• How to ensure reliable DR
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Difficulties
Test
Virtualization helps
Backup platform helps
• Recover virtual and
physical servers
– Can I recovery my physical
servers in to VMs or do I
need other solutions
Source: VMware
Questions and Answers
Dominic Romeo
dromeo@cosentry.com
www.cosentry.com