Data Protection for VMware and Application Data in Mission Critical Environments

Table 6: Virtual machine configuration (Oracle ZDB/IR Backup Test)

Windows Server 2003 SP1

VM boot disk: 30GB vmdk

RDM 1: Oracle control files (c:\mnt\) – 2GB

RDM 2: Oracle Data Files (E:\) – 25GB

RDM 3: Oracle Redo Logs (D:\) – 60GB

RDM 4: Oracle Archive Logs (E:\) – 120GB

RDM configuration

All RDM LUNs must be set to physical compatibility mode.

2 LSI Logic Virtual SCSI adapters. (1 for boot LUN

vmdk, 1 for RDM LUN)

2 virtual CPUs

2 virtual NICs

2 GB RAM

Database configuration

Single instance Oracle Database 10g

NTFS file system for control, redo and archive logs

Oracle database SID: orcl

Oracle base: c:\oracle

Oracle home directory:

c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\db_1

Oracle user: Domain Administrator

Implementation details

As discussed previously in this paper, implementing a backup strategy for a virtual infrastructure is a

very challenging task. Figure 1 showed that depending on the data center need, an administrator

would need to backup the virtual machine, the application and/or its data, and the ESX server itself.

Without advanced technologies such as data protector ZDB/IR and VMware consolidated backup,

the administrator would not only have to perform backups for each of these manually but the virtual

infrastructure RTO and RPO would be much too high. For instance, to backup a running database

the administrator would have to leave this database in backup mode for long periods of time.

Furthermore, to restore application data, the application would have to be down for the entire length

of the restore.

In its simplest implementation, HP Data Protector software ZDB/IR is fully functional with various file

systems and in more complex implementations; ZDB/IR is fully integrated with many enterprise class

applications such as SAP, SQL, and Oracle. The case study presented in this paper will focus on

backups of a virtual machine using VMware Consolidated Backup framework while the enterprise

application in this case Oracle Database 10g is backed up and restored using HP Data Protector

software Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery.

This paper assumes that its readers are familiar with installing, configuring, and using, VMware VI3

components and HP Data Protector software. Else, please refer to HP and VMware documentation

that highlights in ample details installation and configuration steps.