When choosing a virtual machine backup solution, most any program will do in the short run, however it is important to choose a solution that will meet your company’s needs over a long period of time

1. http://www.evdozone.com/2013/05/virtual-machine-backup-better-backup-manager.html May 9, 2013
Why Virtual Machine Backup Is Better Than Your Backup
Manager?
Every company understands how important it is to back up data or even archive emails for
future reference. Backups are not only crucial for disaster recovery purposes, but also for the
long-term business continuity requirements of your company. With the recent growth in
virtualization as a way to maximize resources and implement consolidation measures,
companies will need to change the way they think about backups. Now, more than ever, it is
necessary to consider your virtualized assets when deciding what to back up and how.
Virtualized data just as stored in a
physical environment
"The big thing that’s changed
relatively recently is the criticality of
what we’re virtualizing," says Dave
Russell, research vice president at
Gartner (www.gartner.com).
It’s important to come up with a VM
(virtual machine) backup policy that
is equal to your policy for traditional
data backups. You need to prioritize virtualized data and applications just as you would data
stored in a more physical environment or else you may not be able to fully restore your critical
systems in the event of a temporary outage or widespread failure.
UNDERSTAND YOUR ENVIRONMENT & BACKUP NEEDS
The important thing to remember about virtual machine backup is that it isn’t exactly the
same as traditional backup environments and that doing business as usual from a backup
perspective won’t typically work effectively in a virtualized environment.
One of the biggest problems facing companies today is the sheer amount of solutions on the
market that are specifically built for smaller implementations. For instance, you may start with a
small pilot project and your virtualization administrator can download a tool and feel very
confident it’s going to work, but once you start to deploy 300 or 500 virtual machines at the
same time and reach critical mass, "the cracks will start to show."
VM backup isn't same as traditional
backup>
Traditional backup is a resource-
intensive process that can fill up your
input and output streams as can
other resources such as CPU and
memory. Because virtualization is all
about maximizing efficiency and
putting numerous virtual machines
on one physical server, it can lead to

2. overloading your equipment. If you were to implement 20 VMs on one physical machine, stack
or increase the density of the VM images, and then try to back it up with 10% of your
resources, you would be oversubscribed by 200%. You need to make sure you have systems in
place that can handle that amount of traffic and prevent overtaxing your infrastructure.
Another key to successful VM backup is to consider what you’ll need to protect in the future.
Rather than focusing on the here and now, you’ll need to project where you see your company
a year or more from now. One solution may work perfectly fine with five virtual machines, but as
you grow to 50, 500, or 1,000 machines. From there, you have to decide what types of plug-ins,
applications, and reporting tools, you’ll need. That’s where doing your due diligence upfront will
really pay off.
CHOOSE THE RIGHT SOLUTION
When choosing a virtual machine backup solution, most any program will do in the short run,
however it is important to choose a solution that will meet your company’s needs over a long
period of time.
Some backup solutions are wizard-like and walk you through the selection process. Russell
says, "will require encoding from the ground up." Your company's backup needs and staff
expertise will likely dictate whether you’ll need a fully formed solution or something more
customizable.
You'll also want to consider disaster recovery and other factors when shopping for backup
solutions. You may be able to store VM images on a server, but will you be able to access them
immediately if your company experiences an outage.
Choose solution that meet
company’s needs over a long period
Russell recommends finding a
solution that lets you make the
target location (where you’re writing
the virtual machine) a cold standby
server for your company to use in
case of an outage. That means that
if there’s a failure of any kind in your
primary system, you essentially have
an up-to-date replacement waiting in
the wings.
As with any technology investment, cost will always be a factor. It’s important to speak to
vendors to figure out how they charge for their services and whether they are compatible with
your internal systems.
Some vendors also charge by the socket or by the terabyte, You will need to feel what type of
model is going to work for you at scale when you deploy it throughout the environment. The
more accurate you are with your projected number of virtual machines, the better chance you
have of not overpaying for a solution.
MAKE A BACKUP SCHEDULE & STICK TO IT
Once you have a backup solution in place, you can’t simply set it and forget it. You need a
game plan that details the systems you need to back up and how often. The frequency really
depends on several things but most fundamentally the criticality of the data and the change
rate of the data.

3. With some systems, the new and modified data is pretty infrequent, so you could argue that
you only need to protect them once a week. Other systems are either so important or are being
added to and extended on such a regular basis that maybe snapshotting them once an hour
may be appropriate. You can save money as well as crucial resources by backing up only what is
necessary and following a strict policy.