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Red Hat Virtualization USING COMMVAULT® VIRTUAL MACHINE PROTECTION REAP THE BENEFITS OF RED HAT ENTERPRISE VIRTUALIZATION WITH COMMVAULT® NEXT GENERATION SOFTWARE Today’s enterprise virtualization ecosystems are driven by flexibility of scale, and cloud interoperability. Virtualization is no longer the terminus for operational efficiency, but the foundation of a much larger strategy manifesting itself in the form of the hybrid cloud. As a result, a virtual workload protection strategy must also be flexible and scalable and seamlessly span today’s fluid enterprise virtualization.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY With the advent of the hybrid cloud, virtualization priorities have shifted and the hypervisor to cloud relationship is more important than ever. Enterprises demand that hypervisors should not only scale laterally to meet today’s fast VM provisioning demands, but also to maximize their hardware investments, so the hypervisor can run greater and more powerful workloads. Additionally, virtualization itself is no longer the end goal and having the right hypervisor strategy that is built on open source code, and open API principles, allows for customizability and freedom that is crucial to the modern enterprise. The Red Hat Virtualization Platform (RHV) built on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), exemplifies these principles while offering a stable and mature virtualization solution. As such, a unified protection strategy for RHV workloads integrating at the virtualization layer is the optimal approach for any cloud centric environment. Commvault’s Virtual Machine Protection for Red Hat Virtualization offers just such an approach.
“61% of IT organizations expect their 2015 spending in virtualization and private cloud infrastructure to increase” ENTERPRISE STRATEGYGROUP “2015 ITSpending Intentions Survey,” February 2015
Commvault’s Virtual Server Agent for RHV environments is built to integrate with the RHV-Manager and uses native APIs to perform all necessary functions. It offers the ability to perform complete VM image backups without disruption of the running workloads. The state of the running virtual machine is captured as a point in time backup and protected without the need for an in-guest agent. Protection operations are policy driven and leverage an auto discovery mechanism that intelligently maps the right VMs to the correct policy. This discovery mechanism can follow VMs as they move in the environment, and also automatically protect newly created VMs in a temporary protection “bucket” until the correct policy is determined or configured. Protection operations using the Commvault’s Virtual Server Agent for RHV can automatically and dynamically distribute the load across the KVM hosts. Backup proxies (which are VMs themselves) can easily scale as needed, and as an aggregate are able to intelligently allocate streams to process VMs in the most efficient manner.
“80% of x86 server workloads are virtualized” GARTNER “Magic Quadrant for x86 Server 1 Virtualization Infrastructure”
Client side deduplication reduces the data transfer to the Commvault backup library not only expediting the backup process but also dramatically reducing the virtual machine backup data copies which can be stored to disk, tape, or a cloud library. Deduplication is also critical when sending VM copies to stand-by sites for Disaster Recovery (DR) purposes.
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VIRTUAL SERVER AGENT FOR RHV Commvault’s Virtual Server Agent for RHV uses a hot-add methodology for protecting virtual machines. The VSA lives as a virtual machine inside the RHV clustered environment and as such, it uses the pre-existing infrastructure to perform all its operations. This makes it very easy to deploy and to scale-out while still being centrally managed through a single operational console.
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SINGLE OPERATIONAL CONSOLE COMMVAULT
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At the start of a protection operation, Commvault calls on RHV-M to create virtual machine snapshots (QEMU Redirect-on-Write) for the predetermined virtual machines that need to be backed up. Commvault intelligently determines which need to go first so to efficiently process and distribute the load. As snapshots are created in an orderly fashion, the Virtual Server Agent (which is also a VM), collects all necessary metadata to reassemble the VMs and mounts the now frozen VM disks. The VSA reads the data on the now locally mounted VM disks and streams it to the Commvault’s virtual repository without impacting the still running VM. Because the stream origination is coming from the VSA proxy VM, Commvault software is able to minimize network data transfer by sending only unique blocks to the virtual repository. Not only does this keep the storage footprint of the backup data small, but it considerably expedites the backup process keeping it within operational windows.
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SCALE AND FLEXIBILITY SCALE There are no explicit limits on the size of backups, number of virtual machines, or size of virtual machines that can be backed up. Commvault software works as fast as the compute and memory resources of the VM where the VSA Proxy is installed will allow. This means there is no limit on the number of VMs. Additionally, the VSA Proxy VMs are aware of one another and will work together in an aggregate to load balance the work and provide fail-over. As the environment grows new VSA proxies can be easily deployed and automatically redistribute the workload appropriately.
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RHV CLUSTER
RED HAT VIRTUALIZATION MANAGER
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SINGLE OPERATIONAL CONSOLE COMMVAULT
STORAGE DOMAIN
ONE VIRTUAL REPOSITORY INDEX
ADDITIONAL HOST ADDED TO ACCOMODATE VM GROWTH
NEW VSA PROXIES CAN EASILY BE DEPLOYED TO KEEP UP WITH GROWTH RHEL HOST
FLEXIBILITY VSA Proxies can be installed on either a Windows VM or a Red Hat Enterprise Linux VM. This allows for the protection infrastructure to easily adjust and fit the business and technology requirements of the enterprise. A mixture of the two can also seamlessly work together in heterogeneous environments
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DISCOVERY AND SLA BASED TIERING Different virtual machines (VMs) can have different backup and recovery options that are defined in a service level agreement (SLA) for each class of VM. For example, high transaction VMs that provide customer application support might require multiple daily backups with the requirement to recover virtual machines quickly. User VMs might need the ability to recover specific files and folders on a daily basis, while development and test VMs might only need weekly backups or the ability to recover to predefined states. The frequency of backups should be based on your requirements for data recovery or your SLA and Commvault software can easily accommodate for multiple SLAs in the same environment. To manage different SLAs, Commvault software uses the concept of a Subclient. Subclients are logical containers that define the specific production data (in this case virtual machines) to be protected.
For RHV environments, Subclients can be defined using the same object entities that are found in RHV-M. These can be anything from an entire Data Center, to RHV clusters, to particular hosts, to storage, to individual VMs.
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These can also be configured using a powerful rules based system that will automatically populate the Subclient based on the result of the rule created.
Any newly provisioned VMs, or VMs that were intentionally or accidentally moved, will automatically be picked up by the appropriate Subclient at the time of the protection operation. You can restore one or more virtual machines (VMs) at a time. Virtual machines can be restored in place (overwriting the source virtual machines) or out of place (with a different virtual machine name, or to a different Red Hat cluster, storage domain, or RHV Manager).
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DISASTER RECOVERY While virtual machines can be restored at any time, restoring multiple virtual machines in a single operation can take a significant amount of time. Disaster Recovery (DR) scenarios may require large numbers of virtual machines to be readily available at the moment they are needed. To achieve this, a disaster recovery plan requires creating a stand-by copy at a DR site to which virtual machines are restored on a routine basis. In the event of a disaster, the stand-by copy is readily available with the virtual machines. After the initial restoration of the RHV virtual machines on the stand-by site, incremental backups from the production site update only new or changed blocks (DASH copy) to keep the secondary site in warm stand-by state.
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In more complex environments, DASH copies can run in both directions or even in a triangular configuration where each site will have a copy of the VMs running in production at that other datacenter locations.
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VIRTUAL SERVER DATA PROTECTION SOLVED WITH COMMVAULT® SOFTWARE FOR RHV Commvault® software addresses the data protection and information management challenges arising in the ever changing modern data center environments. Commvault® accelerates the shift into cloud-enabled applications and services while providing the appropriate service levels needed to support data growth in your enterprise. With Commvault software you can: • Protect hundreds of virtual servers in minutes with minimal impact on physical production servers. • Securely and easily protect very large RHV environments with thousands of virtual machines • Automate discovery and protection of new virtual machines for guaranteed protection with minimal administrator intervention • Rapidly create and efficiently move secondary copies of data for retention and disaster recovery using embedded source side deduplication. • Easily manage application and VM data from the same operational console.
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To learn more about the full benefits of Commvault software and virtual server data protection. Please visit commvault.com/virtualization.
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