DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports Events Over 2 million developers have joined DZone. Join Today! Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile Manage Email Subscriptions Moderation Admin Console How to Post to DZone Article Submission Guidelines
View Profile
Sign Out
Refcards
Trend Reports
Events
Zones
Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Partner Zones AWS Cloud
by AWS Developer Relations
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Partner Zones
AWS Cloud
by AWS Developer Relations
  1. DZone
  2. Software Design and Architecture
  3. Cloud Architecture
  4. Legacy VM Backup vs. Native VM Backup

Legacy VM Backup vs. Native VM Backup

Today’s modern VMware backup solutions offer powerful backup and replication features for the enterprise data center environment.

Alex Tray user avatar by
Alex Tray
·
Jan. 17, 23 · Review
Like (1)
Save
Tweet
Share
1.82K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Today's modern VMware backup solutions offer powerful backup and replication features for the enterprise data center environment. When we think about how far we have come with backup technologies and compare them with the legacy backup solutions of days past, we see the tremendous advantages of using a "native" VM backup solution over a "legacy" VM backup solution. What are legacy VM backup solutions, and what do they do when it comes to backing up virtual machines? What are native backup solutions in this regard? How do these two compare, and why do we want to use a native VM backup solution?

Legacy VM Backup Solutions

Legacy VM backup solutions are essentially the same backup solutions that have been used on physical workloads for years and then moved over to virtual machines. The same technology, tools, and methodologies are used with virtual machines as with physical machines. Typically, we may think about a "backup agent" being installed inside the guest operating system for the backup solution to be able to back up virtual machines. Suppose the legacy solution is able to utilize (even in a crude way) the VMware data protection APIs. In that case, they generally still need some sort of agent to be able to perform application-aware backups or granular file restores.

Most administrators who have managed guest operating system agents, either with a backup solution or other technology, can attest to the headache that results. The administrative overhead that is presented with maintaining agents, installations, upgrades, etc., can be a nightmare.

Legacy VM backup solutions that utilize agents introduce another moving part to the backup solution that essentially increases complexity and room for something to go wrong with a VM backup process completing successfully.

Additionally, when we consider other advanced features that are required with modern VM backup solutions when it comes to backing up and restoring virtual machines, we think about replication, application-level restores, instant recovery, and other features that are just not possible with legacy VM backup solutions.

Native VM Backup Solutions and Their Killer Features

Native VM backup solutions integrate seamlessly with virtual infrastructure, are agentless, and take advantage of the powerful built-in API-driven interaction provided by today's virtual infrastructure, in addition to many other benefits. In view of the challenges with legacy VM backup solutions mentioned above, let's take a look at the features of NAKIVO Backup and Replication as an example of native VM backup solutions and find out how the product excels in legacy VM backup solutions in key areas.

Image-Based

First and foremost, NAKIVO Backup and Replication creates "image-based" backups meaning they contain not only the files on disk but also everything needed to recreate the virtual machine in the event something catastrophic happened. In addition, the image-based backup includes all the nuances of the virtual machine that we would expect to be able to recover from, such as the virtual machine settings.

Agentless

The native VM backup approach does not require installing agents within the operating system. NAKIVO Backup and Replication integrates seamlessly with your virtual infrastructure and interacts with it without having additional software installed within the guest operating system. NAKIVO Backup and Replication integrates with the powerful VADP API-driven interface for VMware vSphere and Windows APIs for Hyper-V server. Even without guest operating system agents, NAKIVO Backup and Replication is able to do all the important tasks that one would expect with a modern backup solution, including application-aware backups with log truncation, instant file recovery, instant VM recovery (Flash VM Boot), and instant object recovery for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, and Microsoft Active Directory.

Below we can see the ease with which we can start backing up virtual machine resources with NAKIVO Backup and Replication. We simply add our VMware, EC2, or Hyper-V infrastructure to the inventory and are ready to start setting up backup and replication jobs! Again, no agent is required, and we can add multiple environments with different technologies to the inventory.

Replication

With many of the legacy VM backup products, the only thing you get is a backup. You either have to provide your own replication solution or pay extra for additional licensing that is required to unlock replication features. With native VM backup solutions, such as NAKIVO Backup and Replication, the replication features work out of the box for VMware, AWS EC2, and Hyper-V.

Integrated Performance Features

NAKIVO Backup and Replication has several key features that allow for blistering backup and replication performance in the virtual environment. These include:

  • LAN-free Data Transfer – This mode is automatically used by NAKIVO Backup and Replication for VMware and Hyper-V backups and replication to achieve the best performance by implementing Hot Add and Direct SAN Access features.
  • Hot Add – if NAKIVO Backup and Replication is running on a server with direct access to the VM datastores, it can bypass the host TCP/IP stack, which achieves two benefits: prevents impacting production VM performance and increases the backup performance of VMs using the storage I/O stack only instead of both storage and network I/O stacks.
  • Direct SAN Access – VM data is read directly from a SAN device using either Fiber Chanel or iSCSI.
  • Network Acceleration – This feature reduces the load on the production network caused by backup and replication jobs. Performance of backups, replication, and recovery can be increased by as much as 2X.
  • Full Synthetic Storage – NAKIVO Backup and Replication utilizes full synthetic data storage, which allows it to perform only one full backup, and after this initial transfer, all jobs will be forever- incremental. The full synthetic mode eliminates the need for backup transformation. This means there is no need to transform those increments into full VM backups as other VM backup solutions do. The benefits of eliminating this process in time, resources, and additional storage are significant.

Below we can see a new replication job utilizing many of the native features of NAKIVO Backup and Replication, including App-aware mode, Network Acceleration, and Encryption.

Advanced BaaS and DRaaS

NAKIVO Backup and Replication also provides a great multi-tenancy feature set for both Backup-as-a-Service and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service. This can be used intra-organizationally between business units to delegate the performance of virtual infrastructure backups/replication or by service providers who provide BaaS and DRaaS to customers. But, again, this functionality is far outside the realm of what a legacy VM backup is able to do out of the box.

Modern Backup Automation

API integration is all the rage in today's world of automated operations. Being able to control, automate, and orchestrate VM backup, replication, and recovery tasks is a key component of automating daily IT operations. This allows NAKIVO Backup and Replication to integrate with monitoring, automation, and orchestration solutions, which effectively reduces data protection costs. Unfortunately, the ability to utilize API integration with a legacy VM backup solution is simply out of the question and further emphasizes the disparity between legacy and native VM backup solutions.

Built for the Cloud

Legacy VM backup solutions were engineered before cloud integration became an important business consideration. Therefore, it would be a stretch to find legacy backup solutions that integrate tightly with public cloud solutions. A native modern backup solution like NAKIVO Backup and Replication is fully cloud aware. It integrates tightly with Amazon AWS public cloud allowing EC2 appliances to be configured from the Amazon AWS marketplace to backup Amazon EC2 instances. This allows organizations to take advantage of the same great feature set in the cloud as on-premises, including application-aware backups, backup deduplication, backup copy, network acceleration, instant granular recovery, etc. Additionally, Microsoft Azure storage can be targeted with NAKIVO's backups or backup copy jobs. NAKIVO Backup and Replication allows seamless integration between on-premise and public cloud backup infrastructure resources allowing organizations to take advantage of today's hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Concluding Thoughts

In today's world of virtual infrastructure, whether it be VMware vSphere, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon AWS, legacy VM backup solutions simply do not offer the features and functionality that organizations need in today's hybrid cloud environments. In addition to the lack of features, the administrative overhead that legacy VM backup solutions add to the mix with backup agents and other outdated methodologies prevents organizations from operating backup infrastructures effectively and efficiently. Modern native back-ups solutions, such as NAKIVO Backup and Replication, provide the feature set that allows organizations to be agile, automated, and cloud-ready.

Backup Cloud management Hyper-V Microsoft Windows Virtual management

Published at DZone with permission of Alex Tray. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • DZone's Article Submission Guidelines
  • How to Submit a Post to DZone
  • The 5 Books You Absolutely Must Read as an Engineering Manager
  • Reliability Is Slowing You Down

Comments

Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends: