This whitepaper provides detailed best practices for the planning, design, implementation, and management of the backup/restore of VMware environments using HP DataProtector. These test-proven recommendations were developed in an environment featuring HP Blade Servers, SAN and Networking, Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) devices.
There are detailed comparisons of several methods for SAN based backup and restore of both VMware virtual machines and user data. HP Data Protector provides administrators seamless integration with standard VMware-based image and file backup functionality. In addition to these VMware-based standards, Data Protector offers both an image backup (Data Protector Snapshot) and a highly effective application (Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery) solution.
Included are a set of best practices describing how to deploy a VMware backup infrastructure with Data Protector that can operate in excess of 1 TB/hour, while minimizing storage resource overhead. For large-scale VMware environments that require even greater backup performance, there are details describing how to design a backup solution with performance limited only by the number of backup targets (VTL?s).
There are also best practices for backup workflow and solution dependencies, along with details describing how to avoid potential bottlenecks. Finally, the test environment is described in detail so that this reference architecture combined with the test-proven recommendations can serve as a ?cookbook? to ensure the successful deployment of backup solutions with HP Data Protector and VMware.
