Virtually Prepared

Backing up data is never about the backing up it’s always about the restoration and recovery. Since when is an IT operations team measured and commended for backup completions?

Of all the backup products I’ve been exposed to and implemented in recent years everything about these products is focused on getting data off systems with a client application that’s made to look and feel good. There are application agents in abundance with heterogeneous support for a ‘one fit for all’ backup platform. I’ve never been truly convinced and when it comes to the crunch of a restoration the task has invariably not been tested, apart from the ad-hoc user document recoveries.

Watching the Veeam SureBackup webcast yesterday (25/03/2010) it was quite apparent they couldn’t be more on the flip side to a typical backup vendor approach. Everything about the SureBackup technology they’ve developed is focused on the verification and testing of your backups. So much so the virtual machines don’t even require a restoration to be tested. To me this says everything I need to know that this technology, the vendor wants you to use the backed up data and not forget about it until it’s too late.

I’m not going to provide a full write up here as I haven’t seen or used the application but there were a few key take-aways that sat with me:

• Backups can be restored from any available restore point
• All restores will remain isolated from their ‘live’ equivalents
• No agents are required for the backup & restore, everything is run at the vSphere level
• Where an application comprises of multiple virtual machines a vApps container can be used
• Virtual Machines are directly opened from the backup in a Read Only state, any changes are written to a nominated data store
• Additional or dedicated ESX(i) host(s) are not required unless you’re at capacity of planning to test a vast array of virtual machines
• A VMware Resource Pool is used for the testing of virtual machines to prevent any resource drain to the existing services
• Custom verification scripts can be applied to assist with the test & audit process

There’s a raft of other features but these stuck with me and in the role I have these are the important ones.

More reading here at : www.veeam.com

During my current engagement I couldn’t help notice a few notable points regarding ‘migration readiness’. Specifically I’m focusing on migrating servers, virtual & physical, to another datacenter requiring new server names and IP address assignments.

Physical or virtual migrations at an Operating System level (VMware supported ones that is) just work – fact. Whether you use VMware’s own tool or your own you can guarantee a migration will succeed. Where things become tricky is at an application level. No two vendor applications perform in an identical manner, configuration applications differ, an Active Directory becomes a repository for specifics and distributed architectures make it very hard to un-pick the links to NetBIOS, FQDNs and IP addresses / port numbers.

In a high performing ogranisation with minimal downtime, strict change control, defined implementation plans, handover procedures and warranty periods it would be fair to say a raft of business and technical documentation will exist. Impact of change can be managed and risks mitigated but of course that is if you have the documentation to hand rather than dumped from someones head. Here lies the problem, or does it?

This is the perfect opprtunity to retrieve and document all the missing information. Doubtless there will be pain during the process of a migration if all the facts aren’t present but that was going to happen anyway.

Achievable positives and deliverables:

- Proven documentation of the business impact.
- Proven documentation of the local & distributed services configuration.
- Auditable trail for the creation of the service, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery procedures.

This is the turning point to return documentation and knowledge that were previously elusive or non-existent. This is the opportunity to deliver over and above simply migrating and consolidating.