CA ARCserve® Backup, CA XOsoft™ Replication, and CA XOsoft™ High Availability provide several key features that enable you to both protect virtualized servers and benefit from server virtualization in your overall recovery management strategy
CA ARCserve® Backup r12, CA XOsoftT Replication r12, and CA XOsoftT High Availability r12 - Virtualization Support Server virtualization is becoming widely used because of benefits such as reduced hardware and power costs, but to realize these potential benefits it is essential that virtual machines (VMs) are protected by using specific data protection technologies. Virtualization can also be an important recovery management and business continuity technology, if used with appropriate management and backup tools.
Overview Benefits CA ARCserve® Backup r12, CA XOsoftT Replication r12, CA ARCserve Backup r12, CA XOsoft Replication r12, and and CA XOsoftT High Availability r12 provide several key CA XOsoft High Availability r12 provide the following features that enable you to both protect virtualized servers virtualization support benefits: and benefit from server virtualization in your overall recovery management strategy: . Snapshot technologies to backup VMs, without adversely affecting VM performance. . Protect virtualized servers by using the Agent for VMware or Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service - . Simple disaster recovery procedures to enable rapid based snapshots for snapshot-based backups. physical-to-virtual bare-metal restores. . Restore physical servers to VMs. . Replication and failover technologies to enable VMs to be used as cost-effective replica and standby systems. . Use VMs as disaster recovery hosts.
Protecting Virtual Machines Server virtualization is becoming widely used to help organizations to reduce hardware and power costs. However, VMs must be protected by using specific data protection technologies, such as CA ARCserve Backup r12, which uses snapshot technologies to backup VMs, without affecting VM performance:
. For VMware VMs, CA ARCserve Backup includes a new Agent for VMware, which uses VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). By using the CA ARCserve® Backup r12 for Windows Agent for VMware and VCB you can offload VM backup activity to a dedicated backup proxy system and the proxy system can access and mount VMware snapshots for backups.
. For Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 SP2, and the new Hyper-V virtualization, CA ARCserve Backup integrates with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshots to create point-in-time copies of VMs, and then uses VSS writers to back up these VM snapshots. The CA solution for protecting VMware VMs consists of the following components: . CA ARCserve Backup server . CA ARCserve Backup Agent for VMware
. VMware Consolidated Backup
VMware Consolidated Backup CA ARCserve Backup r12 provides backup support for VMware virtual servers, by using VCB. A storage area network (SAN) is required to perform VCB operations; by using a SAN you reduce the overhead on your VMware ESX server and you can significantly increase the speed and performance of backup operations. You can also back up a VM that is not powered on. The following figure shows a typical VCB environment using CA ARCserve Backup. With VCB, you can also use a backup proxy server to offload the backup tasks, which reduces the impact that backing up has on the LAN that is used by your VMs. By using a VCB proxy, you transfer data to the backup server through the SAN and the backup proxy, rather than directly across the network from the VMs. To support VCB, you must also store your VMs on a SAN that is accessible from your CA ARCserve Backup proxy server. Your VCB server must be running Windows 2003 Server and have access to the SAN where your VMware images are stored. After installing VCB you can view and backup all of your physical and virtual servers from a single CA ARCserve Backup console. By using a single console, you can perform your entire backup and restore procedures for physical and virtual servers from the same location. CA ARCserve Backup r12 provides a logical view of your physical and virtual servers, which enables you to perform backup and restore operations from backup catalogs without seeing the complexity of your virtual environment. You must register one CA ARCserve Backup Agent for each ESX server that is running in your VMware environment, so you do not need to deploy a backup agent onto every virtual server. Another advantage of VCB is the additional restore and recovery options that enable you to take ... [download for more]
