wseaton
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Contributor

Proper methods for backing up large VM's

Forgive me if this question is a bit pedestrian, but I'm a relative newcomer to data center scale virtualization, but have to solve the problem.

I recently took over about 50 virtualized servers running on Vcenter 4, and while everything is running smoothly I've run into a snag regarding our larger VM's. Given I'm certainly not the only guy dealing with terrabyte sized VMs, there has to be some other options and strategy's for dealing with this and am looking for ideas.

Currently our back-up strategy consists of logical segregation between file level back-ups (incremental, etc.) and guest OS back-ups. File level consists of back-up agents running through the guest VMs, and it works fairly well. Guest OS back-ups consist of an automated snap-shot > back-up > delete snap-shot method, and it also works fairly well, with exceptions.

The problem is VMs with a lot of attached storage (we are not using RAW disks). While it's easy to clone / snap-shot a Windows 2008 server, it starts to get inefficient once you start to exceed 100gig or so, and impossible when it get's much larger. Maybe this is something I'm missing with VMware, but as I understand it a guest VM and all the attached storage disks from a SANs are treated as one logical entity from VCenter. So, if you have a base Windows file server (or Exchange server) with several terrabytes of attached storage you can only snap-shot  / clone the entire guest *AND* attached data stores.

In the bare metal days I would use any number of tools to clone just the OS drive (or logical disk array) on a periodic basis with any number of tools and ignored the other logical or physical data volumes. If a round of service packs 'bricked' a server who cares - just restore the logical disk or partition and off you go. Even so, I found I was among a minority of Admins who did this having grasped the concept that Server OS's could be treated the same way as Desktop OS's. So, I'm a bit perplexed as to the best way to handle this in our current environment without having to resort to expensive SANs level 3rd party software.

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