Knowledge Base Article

NetBackup 7.6 Blueprints - Accelerator for VMware

The Technical Services team for Backup and Recovery have produced a number of documents we call "Blueprints".

These Blueprints are designed to show backup and recovery challenges around specific technologies or functions and how NetBackup solves these challenges.

Each Blueprint consists of:

  • Pain Points: What challenges customers face
  • Whiteboard: Shows how NetBackup solves the customer challenges
  • Recommended Configuration: Shows recommended installation
  • Do’s: Gives detailed configurations suggested by Symantec
  • Don'ts: What configurations & pitfalls customers should avoid
  • Advantages: Summarizes the NetBackup advantages

NetBackup Accelerator was introduced in NetBackup 7.5 for file system backups and provided a dramatic reduction in the amount of time required for full backups to disk, such that it is similar to the amount of time required for an incremental backup. In NetBackup 7.6, this capability is extended to VMware virtual machines (VMs), including SharePoint, Exchange and MS SQL databases that are residing within a VM.

NetBackup Accelerator uses VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) functionality to provide Accelerator with a list of blocks that have changed on the virtual disk since the last backup.

NetBackup Accelerator transfers only the changed blocks, along with the extent information that was previously backed up, enabling the synthesis engine on the media server to generate an optimized synthetic full backup. The resulting synthetic full backup image is identical to traditional VMware backups supporting all NetBackup image operations for duplication, verification, and imports.

Customers are having difficulty completing their full backups within their backup window, which can lead to not being able to meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) or Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) or worse case, data loss.

The use of Accelerator for full backups provides the following benefits compared to a traditional full backup:

 Full backups are completed in a substantially reduced amount of time. The initial full backup time will be similar to a standard full VMware backup. Subsequent full backups will perform equivalent to a traditional VMware incremental backup.

  • Reduced I/O within the VM
  • Reduced CPU overhead within the VM
  • Reduced network bandwidth required for transferring data
  • Reduced storage capacity for the backup image
  • VMware Instant Recovery (also new in NetBackup 7.6) can be used with both Accelerator full and incremental backups.

You can download the full Blueprint from the link below.

Published 10 years ago
Version 1.0
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