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VMware Backup and Recovery Best Practices with Data Domain Deduplication Storage

Data center virtualization with VMware creates more storage to manage and protect than their physical counterparts. By making it simple to create and multiply virtual machines, it also becomes more likely that their storage footprints will multiply. This can create VMware server backup challenges.

For example:

  • Multiple similar VM environments, with multiple storage image versions for protection and disaster recovery (DR), can equal much larger storage requirements. Network replication is not feasible.
  • VMware recovery requirements may include both full VMDK images as well as individual file restores to the guest OS. Backing up both VMDK images and guest OS files can offer optimum protection, but the data is highly redundant. With traditional backup storage targets, it would require that much more tape or disk storage capacity.

The highly redundant nature of VMware backup images are a sweet spot for deduplication storage systems. Data Domain systems reduce the footprint for virtual machine backups by as much as 40-60x. Backups are easier to manage and store, and the unique deduplicated data is small enough to replicate over existing networks for highly-efficient disaster recovery, without the risks and costs of tape-based backups.

When using Data Domain storage with well-understood best practices for backup and taking snapshots in VMware, a deployment can simplify management of consistent images. Once stored, the images are ready to restore locally or, with network-efficient replication, at a remote DR site.

Where most file system backups result in 10x-30x data reduction on a Data Domain system, VMDK-inclusive backups commonly offer 40x to 60x reduction.
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