When considering a backup strategy for virtual infrastructure, organizations need to look at all options, and the pros and cons of each. I've recently seen some VMware papers that highlight VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) as an advantage over other backup approaches. Certainly VCB has advantages in VMware's environment, where VMFS makes disk-based snapshots irrelevant. But it's not clear that it's required for other solutions that don't put a proprietary clustered file system between the virtual machine and storage.

VCB leverages VMFS snapshots to provide point-in-time images of the disk. The VCB backup proxy mounts these snapshots and performs a backup without impacting the CPU, network or disk resources of the source server. On the downside, VCB requires users to introduce a new technology to their backup environments. Why introduce a new technology that may offload your NICs but increases complexity and SAN load?

A better approach might be storage server snapshots. Your storage server likely already has snapshot capabilities, supporting many snapshots on different time frequencies. And snapshots can be restored instantly.

Another approach is tried-and-true agent-based backup. While there are valid concerns that agents create I/O bottlenecks that prevent the backup from completing during the backup window, in most instances servers are not anywhere near the point of overloaded I/O. Also, I’ve been poking around “next generation†backup solutions and I’m intrigued by what I see. Avamar and PureDisk, for example, offer solutions that use data deduplication technology in the virtual machine to reduce the size of backups before moving any data. While this may use a few CPU cycles, the impact is minimal and the benefits offered by backup agents, such as application integration, often outweigh the slight CPU load during off-hours.

What is right for your environment? There really isn’t one size that fits all, even within an organization. Virtual Iron provides SMEs with a range of choices. Click here for a paper that describes the pros and cons of different backup methods in a Virtual Iron environment.