The ease with which an organization can create virtual machines in its computing environment has been a major contributor to the rapid and widespread growth of virtualization. The sprawling numbers of virtual machines that have resulted, however, have created challenges for managing data protection. Backing up and restoring data for a dozen or more virtual machines that may reside on an enterprise server can bring all other operations on that server to a grinding halt.
Virtualization has proven to be a key technology in creating the instrumented, interconnected and intelligent operations that characterize today’s smarter planet. The ability of IBM Tivoli solutions to control and protect the massive amounts of information that virtualized environments generate can move virtualization to still greater success with higher levels of manageability and reliability.
IBM offers a range of options for protecting and restoring virtual server data, including:
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments eliminates the burden of running backups on a virtual machine by moving backup workloads to a centralized vStorage backup server. The vStorage backup server takes full and incremental snapshots of the virtual machines, processes the backups and sends the results to an IBM Tivoli Storage Manager server. This solution provides flexible recovery options (file, volume or VM image) from a single-pass backup. Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments also includes these features:
- Support for VMware vSphere 4 and vSphere 5
- Advanced support for VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection and Changed Block Tracking to eliminate the load on the ESX/ESXi server without the need for additional hardware.
- Provides ease to manage multiple vStorage backup servers running on Linux (RHEL or SLES) or Microsoft Windows platforms
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack is an excellent solution for in-guest backup of Windows and Linux VMs on VMware and Hyper-V. It captures data as it changes, is application aware, and provides near-instant restore of the disk volumes it protects. It also has Bare Machine Recovery capabilities to quickly restore or move entire VM images.
An IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backup/archive client can be installed within the guest VM and provide full data management capabilities just as it does with physical servers.
