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Chapter 13. Working with a virtual
environment
Virtual machine technologies provide a powerful tool to help accelerate the development,
testing, deployment and support of PC applications.
As with physical machines, virtual machine (VM) data needs to be backed up periodically
to prevent its loss due to hardware failure or human errors. Since more and more
organizations choose running their business processes in a virtual environment, they need
a solution to perform the data backup and restore on virtual machines. This chapter
covers how Acronis True Image Echo Workstation can be used in virtual and
heterogeneous environments.
13.1 Backing up data on virtual machines
A virtual machine is an emulated computer running within a host operating system. The
software that emulates the computer is called the virtualization software. The most
popular types of virtualization software are VMware Server and VMware Workstation,
Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Virtual PC, Citrix XenServer and Parallels
Workstation.
Generally, a virtual machine can be treated:
1. As a physical computer (when it is online). Most Acronis True Image Echo Workstation
features and settings are applicable to a VM. The backup procedure is almost the same
Chapter 6. Creating backup archives
(see details in
).
2. As a set of files that change in line with the VM state. The files represent the VM
configuration, storage, memory or other parameters. The files can be backed up with
both imaging and file-level backup.
However, backing up the running VM files can prevent us from restoring the virtual
system to a consistent point-in-time state. The issue is somewhat like backing up a
database. (The classic example is the Active Directory database, which seldom can be
recovered to a usable state.) Therefore, integration with dedicated tools available from
VM vendors is advisable.
With the current version of Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, it is advisable that you
treat online virtual computers that need to be backed up, as physical machines.
Stop or suspend the virtual machine if you plan to back up the virtual machine files. Since
the virtual disk file changes from session to session and therefore will be always included
in the backup, incremental or differential backups are not appropriate in this case. An
incremental backup size will be almost equal to a full backup size.
13.2 Recovering data on virtual machines
A virtual disk can be restored from its image (.tib file), previously created with Acronis
True Image Echo Workstation just as physical disk can be recovered.
If the virtual machine cannot start, boot it into Acronis rescue environment using physical
bootable media or RIS server, or by adding the bootable media ISO to the virtual
machine. Another option is to create a new virtual machine with same configuration and
disk size as the imaged machine and recover data to this disk.
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