For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

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July 14, 2008 Q&A: Top Questions About VMware Backup by Stephanie Balaouras, Galen Schreck with Robert Whiteley, Rachel Batiancila	Average: 9  (1 rating)

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Executive Summary

Enterprise adoption of x86 server virtualization is mainstream. Deployment is no longer limited to application development and testing environments, and chances are your organization is virtualizing mission- and business-critical production environments. In addition, many large organizations now have hundreds or thousands of virtual machines to manage. How can you efficiently back up hundreds of virtual machines that contain critical corporate data? Today, VMware is the most widely deployed x86 server virtualization technology and leads the market with third-party backup tools as well. Forrester regularly receives calls about how best to back up large VMware environments. What have we found? IT managers should default to VMware's Consolidated Backup (VCB) as the best option today, but don't hesitate to explore specialized tools and storage-specific functionality — both of which have come a long way to support VM-specific intelligence. To detail this further, here are our answers to the most common questions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1. What are the different VMware backup approaches?
• 2. How does VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) work?
• 3. What backup applications support VCB today?
• 4. How mature is the VCB technology?
• 5. What are some VCB considerations?
• 6. When is it best to use VCB?
• 7. What are the alternatives to VCB that I should consider?

This is an excerpt