Backup Exec 2014 Blueprint - Hyper-V

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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 Backup Exec solves these challenges.

Each Blueprint consists of:

• Pain Points: What challenges customers face
• Whiteboard: Shows how Backup Exec 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 Backup Exec advantages

This Blueprint is designed to help with customers who are utilising Hyper-V.

Virtualization technology has been widely adopted by organizations of all sizes to optimize critical IT assets, such as data and application servers. As a result of this virtualization trend, companies are looking for efficient and effective ways to back up and recover their virtual servers and the critical applications that many of these virtual machines host, such as Microsoft Exchange®, SQL Server®, SharePoint®, and Active Directory®.

We have become a nation of information addicts. What is crystal clear is that we are all suffering from a 21st century ailment – Information Overload – and it is taking over our personal lives, working lives, and our businesses.

Businesses need to protect a broad range of information, generated in a plethora of ways, through multiple applications used by billions of individuals around the world. Organisations not only need to protect their information and IT infrastructure, but need to be aware of how the infrastructure facilitates the sharing and use of the information used by the organisation between, not just connections among colleagues, but linking businesses, from businesses to consumers, as well as between consumers themselves. In other words, all the collaborative environments, and the movement of data while in use.

Accessing work information out of hours, compulsively checking emails, texts and social media and hoarding endless emails and multiple versions of the same file are all symptoms of information overload experienced by those Symantec surveyed. But the technology enabling us to be more productive (fantastic mobile devices and faster connectivity) together with the mismanagement of information is actually counter-productive.

This all means that customers need to keep their backup solutions and strategies reviewed and up-to-date; and the need to ensure that backup is being managed and carried out effectively is growing.

Symantec Backup Exec 2014 delivers comprehensive and reliable backup and recovery for any IT environment.

With the global adoption of virtualisation technologies organisations need to protect everything in their environment with a single backup tool.

Because virtual host servers are used by many companies to virtualize production servers, the loss of a production virtual host can cost an organization more than losing a standalone physical server, since a single virtual host can be responsible for multiple virtual servers. A lost virtual host can impact productivity for hours or even days while the IT administrator struggles to recover or repair the virtualization infrastructure.

Market leaders in virtualization technology include the VMware vSphere platform and the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. Modern backup and recovery solutions designed specifically for VMware and Hyper-V environments are critical to helping organizations quickly recover in the event of a disaster, whether it occurs at the virtual host level, the virtual machine level, the application level, or the file/folder level.

Backup Solutions Specifically Designed for Virtual Environments

Administrators responsible for the backup and recovery of virtualized environments understand the frustration and difficulty associated with backup technologies that are not specifically designed to protect virtual infrastructures. Administrators who rely on legacy, misfit solutions to protect their virtual resources face several challenges:

• Performance impacts from agent-based backups inside virtual machines competing for resources
• Downtime resulting from having to shut down virtual machines in order to protect them completely
• Slow file-by-file backups that repeatedly capture redundant data in each virtual machine
• Lengthy restore processes of an entire virtual machine to recover a single file
• Separate backups for virtualized applications like Microsoft Exchange®, SQL Server®, Active Directory®, and SharePoint®
• Storage management problems from storing backups of large virtual disk files, such as VMDK files

Backup Exec 2014 and key virtual features, such as the Agent for VMware and Hyper-V, are designed specifically to protect virtual environments and solve the problems listed above.

You can use this Blueprint to better understand Backup Exec's virtualisation integration technologies - please download from the link below.