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.
- 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.
