Summary = good core Avamar info and some interesting details/thoughts around how to protect vCD with Avamar. Love Avamar’s dedup rates as always.

Phil George (EMC BRS) – Core Avamar with VMware Walkthrough

• Core Avamar value stuff with VMware (big stuff but core) – VADP+CBT integration, vSphere 5, Image-level/Guest-level, etc.
• Proxy VMs to handle backup load – core Avamar architecture review.
• Avamar Impact on actual customer environment
  • Average Restore times – 17 Hours for Tape vs. 2 Hours for Avamar
  • Average Backup Times – 11 Hours vs. 3 Hours for Avamar
  • Payback – 7 months
  • Staff Time Savings – 5.8 FTEs over 3 year period
• “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is not a fruit, Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”
• Corollary – Knowledge is knowing you can quickly spin up a VM, wisdom is making sure you have a backup setup that can handle the mass of new VMs’
• NDMP with Avamar (NAS level backups) are always incremental – absolutely love this.
• “Dolphins are so smart that within a few weeks….they can train humans to stand at the edge of a pool and give them food.”

Ed Walsh (vSpecialist) – Backing up vCloud Director with Avamar

• White paper from August 2011 on this – have to find it on PowerLink but Chad discusses in this blog post.
  • http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/08/tech-preview-avamar-vcloud-protector.html
• Protection Scenarios
  • Image Recovery of Data Drive for VM/vApp
  • Image Recovery of Entire VM/vApp
  • FLR Recovery from Image Backup
  • vCloud DB Protection (Oracle Plugin)
  • vSphere DB Protection (SQL Plugin)
• This really matters — what if you prevision all your Test/Dev/QA environments with vCD and don’t have protection strategy…..BIG business impact if fails.
• Now onto vBlock + Avamar….another obvious but very easily overlooked application.
• 6 TB Backup seeing 97% dedup rates – customer interview.