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Vmware Data Recovery 1.0 Evaluator'S Guide
Vmware Data Recovery 1.0 Evaluator'S Guide
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Contents
Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
About VMware Data Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
About This Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Intended Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Reference Setup Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
What Will Be Covered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
VMware Data Recovery Evaluation Worksheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Help and Support During Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
VMware Contact Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Providing Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Backup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.1. Perform Initial Backup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2. Manually Trigger a Virtual Machine Backup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.3. Extend a Destination Store . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2. Restore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.1. Virtual Machine Restore Rehearsal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2. Virtual Machine Restore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.3. File Level Restore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
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Getting Started
About VMware® Data Recovery
VMware Data Recovery enables quick, simple, and complete data protection for virtual machines. It is a
disk-based backup and recovery solution. VMware Data Recovery is fully integrated with VMware vCenter™
Server to enable centralized and efficient management of backup jobs. It incorporates capabilities such
as block based data deduplication and performs only incremental backups after the first full backup is
completed to maximize storage efficiency. As a result of deduplication and incremental backups, VMware
Data Recovery significantly reduces the space requirements in the destination disk where the backup data
is stored.
Intended Audience
This guide is intended to cover evaluation cases for IT professionals to evaluate the VMware Data Recovery
data protection and restore features suitable for their Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs).
Assumptions
To successfully use this guide it is assumed that:
• VMware ESX/ESXi has been installed on the physical servers designated for this
evaluation;
• VMware vCenter™ and vSphere Client have been installed in the environment to manage the
ESX hosts1 ;
• Sufficient storage has been allocated and configured to store the virtual machines and the
destination stores;
• Virtual machines have been pre-configured and installed with proper Guest Operating Systems;
• VMware Data Recovery appliance has been downloaded and imported into the vSphere environment;
• VMware Data Recovery Plug-In has been installed on the vSphere Client;
• Proper evaluation licenses have been obtained and installed;
For detailed information regarding installation, configuration, administration, and usage of VMware
vSphere and Data Recovery, please refer to the online documentation:
¹ Note the VMware Data Recovery is not compatible with vCenter Linked Mode.
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vCenter™ Server
One vCenter Server was deployed, managing the ESX hosts.
ESX Hosts
Two ESX hosts were configured in a cluster.
Networking
There was an Active Directory and a Domain Name Server in the lab. The DNS is configured to resolve the
hostname of the VMware Data Recovery appliance. You need to ensure that forward and reverse lookups are
configured properly on your DNS server.
Storage
A Fiber Channel SAN of size 511.75GB shared by the ESX servers.
Figure 2. SAN shared by the ESX Servers in the Reference Setup Environment
Virtual Machines
Two virtual machines running Windows Server 2003 were used. Each virtual machine had a 10GB hard disk.
Note that VMware® Fault Tolerance was not and cannot be configured for the virtual machines protected by
VMware Data Recovery 1.0.1.
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C at e g o r y F e at u r e s W h at w i l l b e c o v e r e d T i m e E s t i m at e s 2
2 Note that the time estimates are dependent on the virtual machines having only one virtual disk of 10GB. If your virtual machines have larger
disk or more than one disk, you will need to allocate more time accordingly.
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H a r d wa r e C h e c k l i s t
Physical Servers
S o f t wa r e C h e c k l i s t
VMware ESX
After you have successfully installed the VMware vSphere and Data Recovery software components on your
hardware, you can proceed to perform the evaluation of VMware Data Recovery. For each scenario, you can
use the corresponding checklist below to ensure that you are following the proper sequence.
Backup
Restore
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Providing Feedback
Your feedback is appreciated on the material included in this guide. In particular, any guidance on the
following topics would be extremely helpful:
• How useful was the information in this guide?
• What other specific topics would you like to see covered?
• Overall, how would you rate this guide? 7
Please send your feedback to the following address: tmdocfeedback@vmware.com, with “VMware Data
Recovery Evaluator’s Guide” in the subject line. Thank you for your help in making this guide a valuable resource.
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1. Backup
1.1. Perform Initial Backup
Background Knowledge
In order to back up virtual machines, a backup job has to be created. A backup job captures the following
attributes and policies:
1. The virtual machines to backup.
2. The destination store to store the protected virtual machines.
3. The backup window (i.e. a time slot in a day) in which the backup job can run.
4. The retention policy used for determining which virtual machine backups are preserved over a period
of time.
Each virtual machine can be protected by only one backup job and each backup job can be associated with
only one destination store. A backup job is run once a day during the backup window that you scheduled.
You can attach at most two destination stores to a VMware Data Recovery appliance. Each destination store
can be at most 1TB. In each destination store, VMware Data Recovery reserves 5 to 8GB of space for internal
usage. Thus, allocating at least 50GB for your destination stores to leave enough space for backup data is
highly recommended.
Using virtual disks (VMDKs) or RDMs for destination stores is recommended since the performance behavior
is well-understood and consistent. CIFS, on the other hand, gives varying performance characteristics across
CIFS providers. In many cases, lab statistics show that virtual disks and RDMs yield better performance than
network-based destination stores.
Destination stores can be stored in RDM with either virtual or physical compatibility. If you plan to save the
destination store to tape by taking snapshots, you will want to use RDM with virtual compatibility. Snapshots
cannot be taken with RDM with physical compatibility.
If a virtual machine has changes that have not been backed up, it is ‘out of compliance’. When you first create
a backup job, the virtual machines are ‘out of compliance’ since they have not been protected at all. You can
manually trigger the Bring to Compliance option or you can wait until the backup job runs in the next
backup window.
VMware Data Recovery performs data deduplication for the backup data, within and across virtual machines.
Virtual machines with the same OS will have only one copy of the OS data stored in the destination stores.
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Getting Started
You have to ensure the VMware Data Recovery Plug-In has been properly installed, and the backup appliance
has been properly imported and configured before proceeding.
Procedure
1. Run the plug-in installer VMwareDataRecoveryPlugin.msi in your vSphere Client machine.
2. Follow the prompts of the installation wizard.
3. Start the vSphere Client, and log in to a vCenter Server.
4. Select Plugins > Manage Plugins and make sure that the Data Recovery plug-in is enabled.
5. You can now use the client plug-in to manage Data Recovery. If the Data Recovery plug-in does not
appear in the vSphere Client, restart the client.
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Figure 1.1c Create a disk to add to the VMware Data Recovery appliance
7. Specify the advanced options for the virtual disk and click Next.
8. Click Finish to create the disk.
9. Reboot the VMware Data Recovery appliance.
This step is needed for the appliance to recognize the new disk.
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3 VMware vCenter Update Manager (VUM) is another tool that you can use to upgrade VMware Tools and virtual hardware in simple steps. It is
recommended that you use VUM to perform these upgrades.
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4. In Destination page, select the destination store for this backup job.
5. In the Backup Window page, accept the default times or specify alternate backup windows and
click Next.
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6. In the Retention Policy page, accept the default retention policy or specify an alternate retention policy
and click Next.
7. In the Ready to Complete page, reviewed the summary information for the backup job and click Next.
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Getting Started
You have to ensure you have created a backup job as illustrated in section 1.1.
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Background Knowledge
If you are concerned about over-provisioning your destination store, you can start with barely sufficient space
in your destination stores and grow as needed, leveraging the VMware Data Recovery capability to extend the
destination stores.
The statistics gathered from the lab indicate that the space requirements will plateau (i.e. remain more or
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less the same) after some time as long as there are no more additions of new protected virtual machines.
Eventually, the amount of space freed by exercising the retention policy will balance the amount of new data
added to the destination store during backups.
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In this release, VMware Data Recovery requires that you unmount the destination store, extend it in the storage
configuration tab of vSphere Client, extend it in the VMware Data Recovery Plug-In interface, then remount it.
It is recommended that you grow by increments (e.g. 10% of the original size) each time since that increment
may be all you need to accommodate all the backups thereafter.
Note that VMware does not support shrinking of destination stores.
VMware Data Recovery runs an integrity check on new backups each day and the entire deduplication store
once a week. If problems are found during the integrity check, the deduplication store is locked. As a result,
no backups or restores can be performed until the issues reported by the integrity check are fixed4. Refer to
the VMware Data Recovery Administrator’s Guide (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vdr_10_admin.pdf ) for
more details.
Getting Started
You have to ensure that a VMware Data Recovery appliance has been properly configured with a destination
store, which you will extend.
Figure 1.3a Change the provisioned size of a Destination Store from 50GB to 60GB
4 Note that with the enhancements in VMware Data Recovery 1.0.1 (as opposed to 1.0), automatic integrity checks do not prevent a backup to
proceed unless problems are found.
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Figure 1.3b Extend a Destination Store after changing the size in virtual machine settings
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2. Restore
2.1. Virtual Machine Restore Rehearsal
Restore Virtual Machine 2.1 Perform a restore rehearsal 15 minutes
Restore 1. Select the virtual machine to restore, its restore point and
Rehearsal
destination store
2. Verify the data restored
3. Delete the virtual machine created during the rehearsal
Background Knowledge
VMware Data Recovery provides you with the capability to rehearse a virtual machine restore without
actually restoring ‘in place’. When you use VMware Data Recovery to perform a Virtual Machine Restore
Rehearsal, VMware Data Recovery restores all the necessary data for a virtual machine without the network.
In this fashion, the restored virtual machine is not ‘online’ and you can log onto the virtual machine to verify if
the files have been properly backed up and can be restored.
Getting Started
You have to ensure there is at least one restore point available for the virtual machine that you desire to
restore. Without a restore point, there is no backup to restore to. In order to create a restore point, you can
either wait for the associated backup job to finish running during the backup window, or manually trigger a
backup run. Both mechanisms are shown in section 1.
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Background Knowledge
You can use VMware Data Recovery to restore your virtual machines to the state captured by the restore
points. If your virtual machine adopts hardware v.7, VMware Data Recovery uses a technique called Changed
Block Tracking to find out which differential blocks and only recovers those blocks.
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5 In this exercise a restore rehearsal is performed by restoring from the latest restore point. You can also choose to do this or click Back to modify
settings such as restore point and destination store.
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Getting Started
You have to ensure there is at least one restore point available for the virtual machine that you desire to
restore. Without a restore point, there is no backup to restore to. In order to create a restore point, you can
either wait for the associated backup job to finish running during the backup window or manually trigger a
backup run. Both mechanisms are shown in section 1.
4. On the Source Selection page, specify a source from which to restore virtual machines and click Next.
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5. On the Destination Selection page, specify how restored machines will be configured and click Next.
6. On the Ready to Complete page, review the configuration and click Restore.
Background Knowledge
Besides virtual machine level restore, VMware Data Recovery provides a capability called File Level Restore
(FLR) for you to restore the files that you need without restoring the whole virtual machine.
Getting Started
You have to ensure there is at least one restore point available for the virtual machine that you desire to
restore. Without a restore point, there is no backup to restore to. In order to create a restore point, you can
either wait for the associated backup job to finish running during the backup window or manually trigger a
backup run. Both mechanisms are shown in section 1.
You also need to ensure that FLR is properly installed. To install FLR, copy the vdrFileRestore.exe to a location
of your choosing on the virtual machine with the files to be restored. All files required for FLR to function as
expected are contained within the vdrFileRestore executable. We suggest that you copy the vdrFileRestore.
exe to c:\FLR.
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4. Enter the number for the desired restore point. For example, you might enter 1.
Opening disk “W2K3-VM02.vmdk”...
Mounting disk “W2K3-VM02.vmdk”...
All disks have been mounted, they are...
“\TEST-VDR-VC\vDR\host\vDR_Cluster\Resources\W2K3-VM02”
“E” <- “W2K3-VM02.vmdk”
Please input “unmount” to terminate application and remove mount point
You can now browse the contents of the disks for the selected restore point and copy files to the virtual
machine currently running, as desired.
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Figure 2.3b W2K3-VM02.vmdk mounted as E: drive (shown beneath C: drive) in Windows Explorer
5. If you desire to mount the latest restore point, you can run the following command in place of step 3
and step 4:
C:\FLR>vdrFileRestore.exe –l -a 10.20.21.170
6. When you have completed any required tasks with the contents of any mounted restore points, close
the connection that vdrFileRestore has established with the restore point by entering unmount at the
command prompt. All disks are unmounted and closed and vdrFileRestore.exe cleans up any remaining
files it has created for its own functioning.
3. Conclusion
VMware Data Recovery is an effective data protection tool for Small & Medium Businesses (SMB). It enables
quick, simple and complete data protection for virtual machines, incorporating capabilities such as block
based data deduplication and performing only incremental backups after the first full backup to maximize
storage efficiency. This guide provides you with step-by-step instructions on how to perform backup and
restore operations using VMware Data Recovery. These operations are straightforward and easy to perform.
After going through the evaluation exercises in this guide, you should be able to make the right choice to
implement your data protection solutions in your virtual datacenter.
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other
marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. VMW_09Q3_DataRecovery_EG_EN_P25_R1