Vmware

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5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery
Sponsored by Veeam Software

Written by: Eric Siebert VMware vExpert and Senior Systems Administrator

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

CONTENTS
Overview 2 Five Significant Improvements 3 Four Enabling Technologies 3 Thin Provisioning 4 vStorage APIs 5 iSCSI Software Initiator 8 Hot-add of Virtual Disk Files 9 Summary 9 About the Author 10 About Veeam Backup & Replication 11

OVERVIEW
VMware’s latest enterprise-level hypervisor product suite, vSphere, includes many new features and technological enhancements over its predecessor, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3). While there are several reasons to upgrade to vSphere, this white paper focuses on how VMware improved various storage technologies, how these relate to data backup and recovery, and how the new vStorage application programming interfaces (APIs) allow for better storage integration with third-party backup applications.

How virtualization improves the backup and recovery process
One of the key benefits of virtualization is that it provides unique and lower-cost options for data protection and disaster recovery. The reason for this is that a VM is encapsulated in a single disk file, which allows for image-level backups instead of traditional file-level backups. By using image-level backups, a VM can be backed up much faster. Image-level backups also allow for greater flexibility when restoring a VM, as either the whole image can be restored or just the individual files. Encapsulation of a VM in a single disk file also provides the ability to easily replicate the VM for application or disaster recovery purposes either on-site or off-site. On-site replication is used for faster application recovery as the VM is located on a spare ESX(i) server in the native, ready-to-restore format, while off-site replication is used for disaster recovery purposes. A spare ESX(i) server can hold many more VMs than the