As virtual servers become more prevalent in the data center, storage administrators are being urged to reconsider backing up VMs and the apps they host. Let’s look at the top factors to consider for back up solutions to safeguard today’s virtual server environments.
The adage is that no one thinks about their backups much until they need them. You would have read the news headlines over the past few months. Whether it is about devastating storms and weather phenomena that can destroy your physical buildings or ransomware attacks that lock you out of your digital estate, backups are more important than ever. For such scenarios, you need the ability to get your servers backed up and running as soon as possible. While there are seemingly many more threats out there that can bring down your critical server infrastructure, it’s also a lot easier to recover from those threats, thanks to virtualization.
The Beauty of Virtualization
According to Spiceworks’ 2020 State of Virtualization Technology Report, 92 percent of businesses use some sort of server virtualization today. There are plenty of good reasons for the ubiquitous presence of virtualization. It lowers expenses by negating the costly practice of over provisioning and reducing labor and maintenance costs. It also adds greater agility to enterprise architectures and increased scalability to meet fluctuating traffic loads. But there is one more benefit that often gets overlooked. It makes backup and recovery a whole lot simpler. Â
Virtualization provides enhanced flexibility when it comes to disaster recovery. That’s because VMs are independent of the underlying hardware, which means that you don’t need to duplicate the physical server environment for your secondary recovery site. This means that you can backup your VM fleet to just about anywhere now. While this opens many more options today, it also creates more factors you must consider when selecting a VM backup solution.Â
1. Deciding what to backup
Many of us decide to declutter our homes now and then by getting rid of stuff we no longer need. It sounds straightforward, and while we may have the best of intentions, we often end up carrying far less out of our house than we first intended. It’s easy for IT managers to get caught in the same type of trap when choosing what to back up. Just as the age of consumerism has resulted in many people owning more stuff than their parents did, the ease of deploying VMs has led to server sprawl. While one can probably justify the existence of every server within a data center today, every server doesn’t need to be backed up. That’s why the first step is to determine what truly needs to be included in a disaster recovery plan. Narrowing the focus of your backup and recovery efforts will reduce your costs and reduce recovery times.
2. Hypervisor compatibility
While VMs may be hardware-independent, they aren’t hypervisor-independent. That’s why it’s imperative to ensure that your backup solutions are compatible with your chosen hypervisors. You also need to confirm version compatibility. In addition, hyperconverged platforms require may require specialized backup systems compared to traditional virtual server clusters.
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3. The difference between snapshots and backups
Snapshots are a wonderful thing. They are automated and don’t require the installation of an agent. You don’t have to discern between full and incremental backups, and they allow you to bring a server back to a designated restore point. But a snapshot isn’t quite the same thing as a backup. Unlike snapshots, backups are self-contained standalone copies of your data that don’t require cross-file dependencies to restore. Because they are independent of the VM, backups can be stored in a different environment by themselves. Snapshots don’t have retention policies either. The snapshotting process will put additional strain on your VM resources and will eat up more and more storage space as they layer on top of one another. While snapshots will fulfill the backup needs for some servers, you probably need a combination of backups and snapshots for application and database servers. Â
4. Cloud or earth
To recover from a worst-case scenario, you need to back up your VMs to a separate location. To bring operations back as quickly as possible, you will need to spin up temporary VMs someplace. This could be a duplicate data center located at another site managed by your organization or a local MSP. You can also choose to host your temporary VMs in a public cloud. Some cloud-based solutions such as Azure Backup can back up to the cloud or on-premise, giving you ultimate flexibility. Each alternative has a different cost structure. The implementation and upkeep of a physical recovery site involve capital expenditure and maintenance costs. While a cloud-based solution has almost no cost upfront, the clock is always running and incurring some costs.
5. Redirecting workloads
Spinning up your server duplicates in the cloud is an excellent recovery method, but unless your workload traffic is diverted to these new servers, they won’t be doing much good. Your DR solution needs to be able to automatically update your DNS infrastructure to redirect workloads to the new location until your on-premise environment can recover from the situation at hand. At that point, you will need to spin down the server replacements and restore traffic to normal.
6. Deduplication and compression
If you are going to send your replicated data someplace, it’s got to be delivered down some pipe. Which often means that your backup traffic is contending with your workload traffic for bandwidth. In the case of the cloud, the more data you pump up there, the more money you will be spending. That’s why it is essential to understand how your backup solution utilizes compression and deduplication. Both methodologies will decrease the size of your backups, which reduces your storage and bandwidth needs. Â
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7. Security measures
You can’t discuss backups without mentioning security. You want to make sure that your backups are encrypted both in transit and at rest. This is especially important if you are backing up to a third-party environment. Security, though, entails more than just encryption. Hackers and ransomware attackers actively target backups now, which is why least privilege access is essential. Your backup system should have integrated security measures that will deny change requests from unauthorized accounts. It should also incorporate multi factor authentication to confirm access attempts through an additional type of authentication besides standard logon credentials such as time-based one-time password (TOTP), biometric or key card. Â
Conclusion
Your VM backups are part of an insurance policy that sits there idle, indolently waiting for a bad event to occur. The trick is to keep those insurance costs low while having the ability to restore your VM environment as quickly as possible and ensure that those backups are protected and tamper-free. Fortunately, there are quite a few great solutions that can offer you the insurance policy you need.
Do you think organizations are doing enough to protect their VM server environments? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!