Protect your virtual machines (VMs) with fast agent-less image-level backup and recovery, leveraging industry-leading deduplication technology to minimize backup infrastructure requirements, and simple management designed for the vSphere administrator.
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Data Protection
Many backup products write their data to tape, which is great for long-term archiving but often difficult and time-consuming to restore. Traditional backup and recovery solutions often fall short of satisfying business requirements because they are too expensive, slow, complex, and unreliable. vSphere Data Protection (VDP) is the ideal backup and recovery solution to protect small vSphere environments, enabling fast and efficient backups to disk and, more importantly, fast and reliable recovery.
- Proven and reliable technology
- Efficient backup and recovery
- Simple configuration and management
Proven and reliable technology
VDP is designed for VMware vSphere – market-leading virtualization platform – and powered by EMC Avamar, market-leading deduplication backup and recovery solution.
The underlying technology found in VDP has been successfully deployed at thousands of customers. VDP provides numerous capabilities and performance optimizations for VMware virtual machine backup and recovery.
Efficient backup and recovery
Ensure backups complete on time during backup windows and keep infrastructure costs at bay despite exponential data growth. VDP optimizes and speeds the backup and recovery process through deduplication and usage of Changed Block Tracking (CBT).
Variable-length Deduplication - VDP is very storage space efficient. The unique EMC Avamar technology enables the highest rates of deduplication in the industry – on average 99% for file systems and 96% for databases. Variable-length deduplication breaks files into sub-segments of variable length to determine those that are truly unique, minimizing backup storage requirements.
Global Deduplication - By deduplicating data across all VMs pointed to the same appliance, VDP further reduces the required backup storage. VMs are often deployed from standardized sets of templates and guest OS images, which makes large parts of their data identical. With VDP redundant data only needs to be stored once.
Changed Block Tracking Backup - VDP reduces the impact on the virtual network during backups by leveraging CBT in combination with variable-length deduplication, sending only daily unique changes to the virtual appliance. VDP automatically merges the unique blocks into the previous backup to create a full backup.
Changed Block Tracking Restore - Unlike most other backup solutions, VDP also leverages CBT during restores. Recovery times can be dramatically reduced by tracking the delta of changed blocks between the current state of the VM and its backup, so that only required blocks are restored.
Simple configuration and management
Many traditional backup solutions used in virtual infrastructures were designed for physical environments and create unnecessary complexity and overhead. VDP delivers seamless integration with vSphere and streamlined management optimized for the vSphere administrator.
Integrated with vSphere – VDP is fully integrated with vCenter Server and is managed natively through the vSphere Web Client, allowing vSphere administrators to manage their entire virtual infrastructure, including backup and recovery, from a “single pane of glass.”
Easy to deploy – VDP is deployed as a virtual machine appliance, making it very easy to deploy with little additional configuration required post-deployment.
Easy to use – Setting backup schedules is simple and efficient since you can define different policies based on specified retentions and schedules. Policies are applied to groups of virtual machines, based on business needs and data types.
One-step recovery – The intuitive web-based user interface of VDP lets you perform simple recovery of full VMs or individual files. VDP also provides the ability for end-user self-service restore to offload restore requests to the IT department.
vSphere Data Protection is available in two editions:
- vSphere Data Protection (VDP), a feature available with all vSphere editions and most kits, provides agent-less image-level backup and recovery to protect small vSphere environments.
- vSphere Data Protection Advanced (VDP Advanced) is sold separately and licensed per CPU, delivering greater scalability and integration with business-critical applications to protect larger vSphere environments. VDP Advanced provides agent-less image-level backups, as well as guest-level application-consistent protection of Microsoft® SQL Server™ and Microsoft® Exchange Server™
15% off for vSphere Data Protection Advanced
vSphere Data Protection Advanced can help your business reduce backup storage consumption by up to 98%.
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VDP Deployed as a Virtual Appliance
Solution Architecture
vSphere Data Protection (VDP) is deployed as a virtual appliance with 4 processors (vCPUs) and 4 GB of RAM. Three configurations of usable backup storage capacity are available: .5 TB, 1 TB, and 2 TB, which consume 850 GB, 1300 GB, and 3100 GB of actual storage capacity respectively. Proper planning should be performed to help ensure proper sizing as additional storage capacity cannot be added once the appliance is deployed. Storage capacity requirements are based on the number of VMs being backed up, amount of data, retention periods and typical data change rates, all of which can vary considerably.
Creating and editing a backup job is accomplished using the Backup tab of the VDP user interface in the vSphere Web Client. Individual VMs can be selected for image-level backup. Containers such as datacenters, clusters and resource pools can also be selected for backup. If a container is selected, all VMs in that container (at the time the backup job runs) are backed up. New VMs added to the container will be included the next time the backup job runs. Likewise, any VMs removed from the container will no longer get backed up. Backup jobs can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly.
Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is leveraged during an image-level backup of a virtual machine. VDP also utilizes CBT during an image-level restore of a VM (to its original location), which can improve speed and efficiency. During the restore process, VDP leverages the vSphere API for Data Protection (VADP) to determine which blocks have changed since the selected restore point. VDP automatically evaluates the workload between both restore methods – restoring all blocks or calculating and restoring only the changed blocks – and utilizes the most efficient method.
It is also possible to restore a VM to a different location and/or rename the restored VM as part of the restore process. The options to power on the VM after restore and disconnect it from the network makes it easy to perform “restore rehearsals” to truly verify virtual machines are protected and data can be restored, if needed. Note that CBT is not leveraged when restoring a VM to an alternate location.
VDP provides the ability to restore individual files and folders/directories within a VM running a supported version and configuration of Microsoft Windows or Linux. Performing a file level restore (FLR) is done using a web-based tool called vSphere Data Protection Restore Client. The process allows end users to perform restores on their own without the assistance of a VDP administrator. The end-user can select a restore point and then browse the file system as it looked at the time when that backup was taken. Once the end user locates the item(s) needing restored, a destination (on the local virtual machine) is selected and the job is started. Progress of the restore job can also be monitored in the tool.
In addition to the reporting capabilities of the user interface, VDP can be configured to send email reports at a specific time once per day on any or all days of the week. Similar to the user interface, these email messages contain details on the VDP appliance, backup jobs, and the VMs that are backed up.
To protect the integrity of an appliance and its data, VDP features a checkpoint and rollback mechanism. A checkpoint is a system-wide backup of the appliance taken to assist with events, which could cause data corruption. An example of this would be an unexpected power-off (versus a graceful shutdown) of the appliance. In this case, the VDP would roll back to the last validated checkpoint. Any backup jobs performed after that checkpoint would be lost, but the risk of data corruption or loss is reduced.
For organizations running VMware Data Recovery (VDR) 2.x, VDP includes a VDR-to-VDP migration utility. This tool will migrate backup data from an existing VDR appliance to a new VDP appliance. Only the backup data is migrated. Backup jobs will need to be created manually. This utility is not available with vSphere Data Protection Advanced (VDP Advanced). Migrating from VDR to VDP Advanced is a two-step process: 1. Migrate VDR to VDP, 2. Upgrade VDP to VDP Advanced.
Simple Backup Job Creation and Editing
Fast and Easy Recovery
File-level Recovery
