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Veritas.com
Support

Two Steps Forward With No Steps Back

Kristine_Mitche
Not applicable
Employee
‎01-20-2012 05:16 PM

Forget the itchy  socks, the sweater I will never wear, and the crock pot (nice try…but still not getting me to cook). You can imagine my excitement when I opened this Christmas gift – a vintage typewriter keyboard for my iPad. If you are like me, you love your iPad, but still struggle with the keyboard. You also love cool and unusual gifts. But this got me thinking…what is it about human nature that digresses back to old practices? You know what I’m talking about – 2 steps forward, one step back. This was so obvious to me when I spoke to a customer the other day.  They have a manual, “old school” process in place to protect their virtual machines (VMs). In fact, they have one full time person who does nothing but map VM datastores to backup policies. Now here’s a cool technology like virtualization and yet we implement manual processes to protect it? Really?!

Now saying that virtual machines are dynamic is like saying that World of Warcraft is addicting. But the difference is – the benefit and the challenge are one and the same. From a server utilization perspective – turning one server into ten has huge economies of scale. From a backup perspective – it’s a NIGHTMARE. It’s like Tetris…they keep generating and coming at you with relentless abandon. With a CAGR of 40% YOY and VM admins creating new VMs with a click of the mouse,  because – well….they can! You can imagine the challenge from a backup perspective if that person isn’t one and the same. Add a manual procedure to this and you are just asking for trouble.  Why don’t we give the backup admin some well deserved relief?  The solution? AUTOMATE VM protection.  No more having to depend on the VM admin to file IT tickets to back up their VMs. With NetBackup’s VM Intelligent Policy, protecting VMware is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse. No more finding out that a VM exists only when being asked to restore it. (D’oh!)  

NetBackup’s VM Intelligent Policy leverages V-Ray to automatically discover, identify and protect VMs as they come online - whether they are new, cloned or migrated from another location. This means that VMs can be protected wherever they may reside, and WITHOUT having to edit the backup policy. It basically puts virtual machine protection on “auto-pilot”.  With VM Intelligent Policy you can easily select (or filter) virtual machines for backup based on over 25 different VMware attributes for easier management. For example:

  • Backup all the virtual machines in Power On state
  • Backup all virtual machines on Datastore X
  • Backup all the virtual machines for which display name starts with VMprod

In addition, this filtering can allow VMware vCenter to balance the backup load across various ESX servers thus improving performance while reducing impact.  And to top it off, NetBackup can automatically adjust for any other changes that VMware technologies such as VMotion, Storage VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) etc. have made to every virtual machine.

So let’s give the backup admin some relief and take two steps forward with no steps back by automating VM protection!