Data Recovery – Administrator’s Guide
o Data Recovery uses a VM appliance & a client plug-in to manage & restore backups.
o All backed-up VMs are stored in a de-duplicated store.
o Data Recovery supports the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS),
o Data Recovery can concurrently back up a maximum of eight VMs.
o Maximum of eight restore jobs Passed VCP410 can run at the same time.
o No more than two backup destinations simultaneously.
o The backups use the changed block tracking functionality on the ESX hosts.
o To maximize de-duplication, back up similar VMs to the same destination.
o Valid vSphere licensing includes: Essential Plus, Advanced, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus licenses.
o Each Data recovery backup appliance can protect a total of 100 VMs
o VSS produces consistent shadow copies by coordinating with business applications, file-system services, backup applications, fast-recovery
solutions, & storage hardware. VSS support is provided with VMware Tools. VMware provides a VSS Requestor & a VSS Snapshot Provider
(VSP). The Requester component is available inside a supported guest & responds to events from an external backup application. The
Requestor also controls the progress of backup operations inside the guest and interacts with the VSP. The Requestor is instantiated by the
VMware Tools service when a backup process is initialized. The VSP is registered as a Windows service & notifies Data Recovery of providerspecific
events during a VSS backup.
o VSS is supported on:
o Windows Server 2003, 32 bit & 64 bit
o Windows Vista, 32 bit & 64 bit
o Windows Server 2008, 32 bit & 64 bit
o For VMs with Windows operating systems Passed VCP 4 that do not support VSS, VMware Tools uses the default LGTO SYNC driver. For other guest
operating systems, VMware Tools uses crash-consistent quiescing.
o Data Recovery is designed to support de-duplication stores that are up to 1TB & each backup appliance is designed to support the use of two
de-duplication stores. Data Recovery does not impose limits on the size of de-duplication stores or number of de-duplication stores, but if
more than two stores are used or as the size of a store exceeds one terabyte, performance may be affected.
o You can store backups on any virtual disk supported by ESX. Data Recovery also supports Common Internet File System (CIFS) based storage
such as SAMBA.
o The Data Recovery plug-in connects to the backup appliance using port 22024.
o First time logging on to the backup appliance, the default credentials are username: root, password: vmw@re.
o By default, backup jobs run at night on Monday through Friday & at any time on Saturday & Sunday. Data Recovery attempts to back up each
VM in a job once a day during its backup window.
o Complete a restore rehearsal to confirm vcp 410 that a VM is being backed up as expected & that a successful restore operation would complete as
expected.
From Mike Laverick’s notes:
o De-duplication process operates by analyzing the VM to be backed up & breaking it up into smaller variable blocks size chunks which are
anywhere between the range of 2KB to 64KB.
o The de-duplication process cannot be disabled; the data is also encrypted to prevent malicious interception of the data.
o De-duplication data is stored as 1GB files in the VMwareDataRecovery folder.
o Backup of individual files contained inside the VM is currently “experimental”.
o Both VCB & vDR cannot backup the end-user generated snapshots.
o vDR can utilize tape but you need a 3rd party solution.
12/24/2009
