VDP, CBT and write-intensive disks

[athompson88]

My organization is fairly small and we're exploring our enterprise backup solution options. I've been tasked with coming up with an approach that meets certain requirements, one of those being nightly backups of all our hosts. We're a windows shop so I started investigating Windows Backup, but I'm not excited by my options there as it either requires pushing hundreds of gigabytes unnecessarily across the network each night, or using shadow copies to track changes to files which imposes a significant write penalty. We run vSphere 5.5, and I started looking at the options VPD gives us. I was particularly interested in how Changed Block Tracking might be a good option for our situation. One sticking point is that on certain hosts where we keep our database data files, I need to exclude those vmdks from backups and CBT (the database backups are going to be what we'd use in recover anyway). Is this an option? All the literature presents CBT as either "all-on" or "all-off" when it comes to the vmdks, but also doesn't explicitly say that a heterogeneous CBT configuration for disks is out of the question.

Thanks!

[wwan]

Depends on your budget, veeam supports exclusion of vmdks in a VM and 5.5 is now officially supported.

[snekkalapudi]

VDP # 5.5.1.356 is available with vSphere 5.5 Essentials+ & above. In this release VDP offers granular backup which means you can select a specific vmdk for backup instead of the whole VM. But CBT is not an option that you choose to turn OFF. VDP enables it on the VM when you create a backup job.

Also, I would recommend a storage provisioning that can leverage hot-add transport mode. VDP use hot-add(transport mode) if available so that you can avoid network traffic. Hot-add operates at storage level and is way much faster than backing up the VM over network.

[athompson88]

So if CBT can't be enabled on a disk-by-disk basis, can anyone speak to the performance hit that would be taken on a disk that has fairly intensive I/O?

[wwan]

Most people recon impact would be very small. See links below. You might need to test it out and see whether it is worth doing that. But for the sake of backup, it is definitely worthy.  Unless there are users on VMs 24/7, I doubt anyone would notice the performance impact when they are being backed up at night.

By markachtemichuk  - http://virtualizationeh.ca/2010/06/04/performance-penalty-for-change-block-tracking-cbt/

By  Duncan Epping  - http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/12/21/changed-block-tracking/

[vMariaL]

wwan wrote:

Depends on your budget, veeam supports exclusion of vmdks in a VM and 5.5 is now officially supported.

Hi wwan, thank you for mentioning Veeam!

athompson88, Veeam Backup & Replication fully supports vSphere 5.5, CBT and incremental backups, has 2-in-1 backup and replication, many restore options, built-in deduplication and compression, and other. The minimum VMware licensing is vSphere Essentials.

Please let me know if any questions will appear or if you will need any assistance.

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Veeam Community Manager