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VMware View Business Process Desktop with EMC Avamar Deduplication Backup Software and System

VMware View Desktop Solutions

At a Glance

The VMware View® Business Process Desktop™ Solution, built with EMC Avamar© enables organizations to deploy a deduplication backup software and system optimized for VMware environments. Avamar addresses the challenges associated with backup and recovery for virtualized desktops in VMware View™. Avamar employs true variable-length deduplication to dramatically reduce backup times and backup storage. Although Avamar only needs to back up unique daily changes it stores the data in a full daily format to enable file-level restores in a single step. Avamar’s purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA), the Avamar Data Store, provides scalability, high reliability and accessibility through its unique RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) architecture. Avamar is also tightly integrated to EMC Data Domain systems to add additional performance and scalability for large virtualized environments.

Virtualization Brings Numerous Benefits, but Challenges Traditional Backup and Recovery

Server consolidation with VMware provides many benefits to IT organizations, including reduced costs, simplified provisioning, decreased datacenter footprint, and lower power consumption. As the total amount of data stored on virtual machines that share common resources increases, traditional backup solutions have trouble meeting backup windows—putting your data integrity and business continuity at risk.

EMC® Avamar® provides client-side data deduplication, providing extremely fast and efficient backup and recovery. Avamar protects virtual machines by deduplicating data at the client—so that only new, unique, sub-file, variable-length data segments are sent during daily full backups. This dramatically reduces the daily impact on the virtual and physical infrastructure by up to 99 percent as compared to traditional full-backup methods. While traditional backup software moves upward of 200 percent of the primary backup data on a weekly basis, Avamar moves as little as two percent over the same seven-day period—removing backup bottlenecks and enabling even greater levels of virtualization. Avamar backs up data globally across physical and virtual servers. For virtualized environments, flexible backup options include guest- and image-level backups.

Guest-Level Backup and Recovery

A lightweight Avamar agent is installed inside each virtual machine and deduplicates the data within each. Avamar then moves only the unique changed blocks through the ESX server to the Avamar Data Store. Since only changed blocks are moved, this reduces resource contention and shortens backup windows. Avamar achieves the highest levels of deduplication at the guest level while providing application-consistent hot backups. Fast file-level restore ensures business continuity with minimal latency.

Image-Level (VMDK) Backup and Recovery

Avamar is tightly integrated to the vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP). Avamar spins up a Universal Proxy virtual machine, off-loading the backup process from any of the virtual machines where the applications are running. Through vSphere, each virtual

•Deduplicationbackupsoftwareand system

•OptimizedforVMware® vSphere™ 4.x and 5.x

•FullyintegratedwithVMwarevCenter™

•LeverageChangedBlockTracking (CBT) for faster backup and recovery

•Universalproxy-serverloadbalancing for increased backup throughput

•Reducesnetworkbandwidthforbackup by up to 99 percent

•Enablesgreaterserverconsolidation

•Globaldeduplicationreducestotal backup storage by up to 95 percent

•RAINforhighavailability,dailydata recoverability checks

•Idealforbothvirtualandphysicalservers,remoteoffices,LAN/NASstorage,desktops/laptops

ESSENTIALS

VMware View Business Process Desktop with EMC Avamar Deduplication Backup Software and System

S O L U T I O N B R I E F

machine is dynamically mounted to the proxy without physically moving data across the network, enabling Avamar to back up numerous virtual machines in just minutes. To maximize backup throughput, Avamar uses a load-balancing algorithm across multiple proxy virtual machines. Instead of being locked into using only a single proxy for a set of virtual machines, Avamar leverages numerous proxies and sends a backup job to an available proxy.

Avamar also takes advantage of VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) to further speed the backup and restore processes. VMware presents only changed blocks to the Avamar agent, where each block is broken into variable length segments and further evaluated for uniqueness.Onlytheuniquesegmentsaresentforbackup,achievingthefastestbackuppossible. Conversely, the restore process also leverages CBT for faster recovery. Avamar enables full virtual machine or file-level restore to the original, an existing, or a new virtual machine—directly from the Avamar user interface. Also available with image backups is disk-level granularity which enables Avamar to back up specific virtual disks, thus reducing backup times and backup storage. Thin-provisioned recovery speeds the restore process and reduces required storage.

Easily Manage the Virtual Environment

The Avamar user interface and its integration into vCenter simplifies backup management of the virtual environment. Auto-discovery of all virtual machines and their protection scheme (guest, image) clearly provides insight of the protection status, and more importantly which virtual machines are not protected. The Activity Monitor displays backup and restore operations. It is very easy to define backup groups and policies, quickly meeting the demands for protecting a dynamic virtual environment.

Protecting a VMware View Environment

The best approach for protecting an entire VMware View infrastructure is to protect the key components independently using the Avamar client software agents. This approach helps companies avoid the infrastructure costs of duplicating the entire VMware View solution for presentation to the backup environment. As a best practice, user home directories and virtual desktop templates should be stored on a centralized shared storage device. Avamar has a specialized accelerator node to protect NAS storage devices that can access data using NFS, CIFS, or NDMP. Avamar enables the recovery of the individual components that make up the VMware View environment. Individual components can then be manually brought back into the VMware View environment based on the level of recovery required. Figure 1 provides a diagram of the reference architecture.

•Shortenbackupand recovery time

•Simplifydataprotectionmanagement

•Shrinkstoragerequirements

•Enhanceproductivitythroughone-step recovery

•Purpose-builtbackupappliancesfor scalability, high availability, and reliability

•Providesreplicationfordisasterrecovery

•Lowercosts

KEY BENEFITS

VMware View Business Process Desktop with EMC Avamar Deduplication Backup Software and System

EMC2, EMC, and the EMC logo, are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc., in the United States and other jurisdictions. © Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

Protecting the NAS Server Through the NDMP Accelerator Node

Avamar delivers an industry-leading, innovative solution for NAS backup and recovery without the need for a dedicated, high-speed NDMP backup network. With an Avamar NDMP Accelerator node, a level-0 backup is performed only once, during the initial full backup. Subsequent daily full backups are achieved by requesting only level-1 incremental dumps, enabling Avamar to dramatically reduce backup times and the impact on NAS resources and networks. Avamar eliminates backup bottlenecks and provides the freedom to consolidate storage and optimize NAS systems—without the hassle of limiting the number and size of files or volumes due to backup performance limitations.

Figure 1: Avamar Deployment for Business Process Desktop Backup and Recovery

Find Out More

To learn more about EMC Avamar: http://www.emc.com/backup-and-recovery/avamar/avamar.htm.

To learn more about VMware View: http://www.vmware.com/view.