{"id":10926,"date":"2010-11-04T10:21:05","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T10:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=10926"},"modified":"2010-11-04T10:21:05","modified_gmt":"2010-11-04T10:21:05","slug":"cios-delaying-virtualisation-because-they-dont-trust-backup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=10926","title":{"rendered":"CIO’s Delaying Virtualisation Because They Don’t Trust Backup"},"content":{"rendered":"

With some\u00a0incredulity, I just read a story on TechCentral.ie\u00a0<\/a> where Veeam says that:<\/p>\n

“44% of IT directors say they avoid using virtualisation for mission-critical workloads because of concerns about backup and recovery. At the same time, only 68% of virtual servers are, on average, backed up, according to the study of 500 IT directors across Europe and the US”.<\/em><\/p>\n

That’s pretty damned amazing.\u00a0 Why do I say that?\u00a0 Because I know one MS partner here in Ireland sells Hyper-V because it makes backups easier and more reliable.<\/p>\n

Hyper-V features a volume shadow snapshot service (VSS) provider.\u00a0 This allows compatible backup solutions (there’s plenty out there) to safely backup VM’s at the host level.\u00a0 This means that backing up a VM, its system state, its applications, and its data is a simple backup of a few files (it’s a bit more complicated than that under the hood).\u00a0 From the admins perspective, it’s just like backing up a few Word documents on a file server.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here’s the cool bit.\u00a0 When a Hyper-V VM is quiesced, the VSS providers within the VM also start up.\u00a0 Any file services, Exchange services, SQL, and so on, are all put into a safe state to allow a backup to take place with no service interruption.\u00a0 Everything is backed up in a safe, consistent, and reliable manner.\u00a0 The result is that the organisation has a backup of the entire VM that can be restored very quickly.<\/p>\n

Now compare being able to backup a VM by restoring a few files comapred to doing a complete restoration of a physical server when some 2-5 year old piece of tin dies.\u00a0 You won’t get identical hardware and will have lots of fun restoring it.<\/p>\n

BTW, if a physical piece of tin suddenly dies in a Hyper-V cluster then the VM just fails over to another host and starts working there.\u00a0 There’s no comparison in the physical world.\u00a0 Sure you can cluster there but it’ll cost you a whole lot more than a virtualisation cluster and be a lot more complicated.<\/p>\n

Sounds good?\u00a0 It gets better.\u00a0 Backing up a Hyper-V cluster at the host level is actually not a good idea (sounds odd that something good starts with something bad, eh?).\u00a0 This is because a CSV will go into redirected more during the backup to allow the CSV owner complete access to the file system.\u00a0 You get a drop in performance as host I\/O is redirected over the CSV network via the CSV owner to the SAN storage.\u00a0 We can eliminate all of that and simplify backup by using VSS enabled storage.\u00a0 That means choosing storage with VSS providers.\u00a0 Now you backup LUNs on the SAN instead of disks on a host.\u00a0 The result is quicker and more reliable backups, with less configuration.\u00a0 Who wouldn’t like that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With some\u00a0incredulity, I just read a story on TechCentral.ie\u00a0 where Veeam says that: “44% of IT directors say they avoid using virtualisation for mission-critical workloads because of concerns about backup and recovery. At the same time, only 68% of virtual servers are, on average, backed up, according to the study of 500 IT directors across … Continue reading “CIO’s Delaying Virtualisation Because They Don’t Trust Backup”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[55,175,63,181,193],"class_list":["post-10926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hyper-v","tag-backup","tag-dpm","tag-failover-clustering","tag-hyper-v","tag-system-center"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t