Presented by Alton Yu and Laurynas Kavaliauskas

Summary = Core vSphere backup concepts and some new stuff around vCD + View. Worth attending.

Agenda for the session.

• Why Backups?
  • 93% of companies that lost their data for more than 10 days went out of business.
• vSphere Backup
  • Some Basics – used floppies and now tapes to backup.
  • Virtual Disk Basics
  • Why VDDK
• vCloud Basics and Backup
  • Architecture
  • Tenancy
• New Backup
  • Architecture and whatnot.
  • Linked Clones

More after the jump…

Walkthrough of how VADP works in core vSphere backups — snapshot of VM so base disk or lower snapshot can be mounted read-only on a proxy ESX host and backed up. Core stuff….

Cloud Concepts

• Organization
  • Unit of tenancy; isolate lines of business.
  • Manages users, apply policy controls.
• vApp
  • Logical grouping of VMs and networks.
  • Deployed and managed as a unit.
• Catalog
  • Stores vApp Templates and Media
  • Orgs can have multiple catalogs.
  • Catalogs can be shared or published.
• Provider VDC
  • Cloud abstraction for vSphere resources
  • lBacked by Resource Pool or Cluster and data stores.
• Org VDC – one level lower.
  • Single-tenant container allocated in Provider VDC
  • Resource allocation to organizatoins
• Internal Networks
  • Isolated L2 networks, scoped to vApp or Organization
  • Provisioned from network pool
• External Networks
  • Goes in between Internal networks and even outside.

vApps in vSphere vs. vCD. In vSphere a vApp is really just a container. In vCD a vApp shows up very differently….different features of course.

Various Cloud Personas – Cloud Admin (do everything, create/config/etc.), Org Admin, End Users (use vApp from catalog, create vApp networks)

3 API’s for vCD – vCD API (REST native, see VMs, everything you can do in vCD GUI etc.), vSphere SDK (everything you can do in the client), VDDK (for backups).

What can we backup with vCD? Entire org vApp, specific vApp, specific vApp’s metadata, certain VMs inside a vAPP. Right now can’t do some things – backup holistically, backup set of files inside a VM, incremental VM backup, restore entire volume, restore VM, restore incremental set, restore at file level.

Use cases we’ve asked for from backup partners – Manage credentials, select vApp you want, do the backup, restore into existing vApp, restore to new vApp, preserve metadata.

High-level Work-flow – there’s frankly a lot to consider here.

Now done vCloud Director backup….seriously complex stuff here….lot to consider and a lot of it not worked out yet.

Question from me – So what do I do when suggesting what to do for backups for vCD? Answer = lots of holes…EMC has a whitepaper, NetApp has some SnapCreate support, can’t say publicly anything other than that.

Now on to View backups…

Talking about all the components as we want to backup everything – View desktops, Security Server, Linked Clones, View Manager, etc. etc.

Working through the VMware data flow….lots of points of backup frankly….it’s crazy build slides.

Backup Requirements for View – databases in AD-LDS AD database for Pools config, EVents/log. What’s in AD-LDS is critical for View to function. Back it up all the time — daily at least.

If you backup a Linked Clone right now, you get the whole VM…issue.

Stateless desktop — grab the master, persona stuff, etc.

Recommended Backup Process for Stateful desktops – put an agent inside each machine. This works with Avamar (VM names change dynamically, getting new VMs spun up, etc. etc.) but would be very painful for other backup systems.