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Executive summary
HP StoreOnce Backup Systems and Quest Software's vRanger deliver an efficient, high performance, and robust
solution for backing up and recovering VMware environments. vRanger provides simple management and powerful
protection management features. StoreOnce Backup Systems provide a high-performance deduplicating disk backup
target. This document describes how to implement an end-to-end backup and recovery solution for VMware
environments.
A summary of the best-practice recommendations is:
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HP StoreOnce Backup Systems
The StoreOnce Backup Systems are a family of disk-based backup targets (Figure 1). They offer inline data
deduplication for cost-effective, consolidated backups, and fast restore of data. For disaster recovery, the
StoreOnce Backup System enables better bandwidth replication to create a copy at a remote location.
The StoreOnce Backup System can present CIFS, Network File System (NFS), and Virtual Tape (VT) interfaces for
integration with backup applications. Connectivity is over Ethernet (CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI VT) and Fibre Channel (VT).
For integration with Quest vRanger, the CIFS or NFS interfaces are supported. vRanger does not support VT and
therefore not backup over Fibre Channel. The appliances offer usable physical capacities from 1.5 TB to 72 TB. The
effective capacity is the usable capacity multiplied by the achieved deduplication ratio.
The deduplication ratio is dependent upon multiple factors including the data types being protected, the backup mode
(full, incremental, differential, and variations on these), backup data retention times and the change rate of the data.
VMware images generally deduplicate at a higher ratio than databases or file-system stored data. Other general
principles are:
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Configure a single Common Internet File System (CIFS) Network Attached Storage (NAS) Share on the
StoreOnce Backup System for the vRanger Repository
Consolidate the backup of multiple virtual machines into a single vRanger backup job and use its Resource
Manager to control the number of concurrent backups per Datastore, VMware Host, and Repository
Turn off vRanger Repository compression and encryption to improve the deduplication on the
StoreOnce Backup System
Use vRanger to enable VMware's Change Block Tracking on the virtual machines for fastest possible backups
Enable vRanger's Active Block Mapping to reduce the size of the backups sent to the StoreOnce Backup System
Run vRanger in a virtual machine for small to medium-sized VMware installations where costs must be minimized
Run vRanger on a dedicated physical machine for larger environments to improve backup performance
Use the
HP Sizing Tool
to size the StoreOnce Backup System component of the solution
Ensure the hardware component firmware and software in the StoreOnce Backup System are fully up-to-date;
Check at:
http://www.hp.com/support
Remember the backup is to deduplicating disk, not general-purpose disk, so configure time for the
StoreOnce Backup System Housekeeping process to run every day
vRanger backups can be integrated with backup applications that support tape if the backup data needs
copying/migrating from the StoreOnce Backup System to tape
Understand the settings that can be tuned to configure the best performing protection solution and test the
configuration in a non-production environment before implementation
Data with a high change rate will typically have a lower deduplication ratio than slower changing data.
Daily full backups will give a higher deduplication ratio than incremental and differential backups
Longer backup data retention times typically increase the deduplication ratio
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