Data Protection for VMware and Application Data in Mission Critical Environments

During the backup operation the backup mount point “v:\images” is populated with all the files that
encapsulate the virtual machine in question.
Figure 19: VCB Full Backup mount point
This process provides a crash consistent backup copy of the virtual machine, the OS running inside of
it, and all virtual machine specific configuration files. Since most virtual machines are installed on
virtual disks, VCB provides better backup granularity, and much more space efficiency of backups
than SAN backups of an entire VMFS volume that may house many more VMs.
VMware Consolidated Backup Integration in HP Data Protector 6.1
software using the VMware online agent integration
Even here VMware Consolidated Backup is the solution of choice when backing up virtual machines
because it provides the flexibility of VM-file level incremental/differential backups (VCB file), full
backups (VCB file) and virtual machine image (VCB image) backups. VCB removes the load of
performing backups from the ESX server and essentially eliminates backup windows.
Data Protector integrates with VMware virtual infrastructure through the Data Protector VMware
integration agent, which channels communication between the Data Protector Session Manager and
the clients in the VMware environment. The Data Protector VMware integration agent communicates
with the virtual infrastructure through VI SDK, a web-service API.
VCB consists of two use cases:
1. Perform Backup
-Full image backup
-File Level backup (Windows only)
2. Perform Restore
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