White Paper

Backup & Recovery for VMware Environments

with Avamar 7
A Detailed Review

Abstract
With the ever increasing pace of virtual environments deployed
in the enterprise cloud, the requirements for protecting these
environments are quickly being identified as the bottleneck to
deployment expansion. This white paper highlights several new
features within EMC® Avamar® 7 that specifically target and
greatly advance the capabilities, performance, and management
of VMware® data protection. With these features, EMC Avamar
is enabling the rapid continued expansion of cloud
environments, required by the demand for IT-as-a-Service
(ITaaS)
June 2013
Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate of

its publication date. The information is subject to change
without notice.

The information in this publication is provided “as is.” EMC

Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind
with respect to the information in this publication, and
specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or
fitness for a particular purpose.

Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in

this publication requires an applicable software license.

For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC
Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com.

VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. All other

trademarks used herein are the property of their respective
owners.

Part Number h8945.2

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Table of Contents
Executive summary ......................................................................... 4  
Audience ........................................................................................................................... 5  
Introduction .................................................................................. 5  
Avamar: Efficient Data Protection for VMware Environments. ............... 6  
Guest-level Backup & Restore ............................................................................................ 6  
Image-level Backup & Restore ........................................................................................... 7  
VM Recovery Flexibility: Avamar VM Instant Access
and Changed-Block Tracking for Restore .......................................................................... 10  
VM Data Protection Management: Avamar vCenter Integration ......................................... 13  
VM Data Protection Management: EMC Avamar Plug-In for vSphere Web Client ................ 15  
Conclusion .................................................................................. 17  
References .................................................................................. 18  

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Executive summary
IT backup administrators face many challenges as they witness virtual cloud
environments growing exponentially, and no aspect can pose greater difficulty to this
growth than in the area of backup and recovery. While virtualization technology
optimizes the use of the physical resources on a physical server basis, ultimately the
underlying resources and applications available to efficiently protect these
environments can limit planned expansion from a data protection manageability
perspective.
Today’s virtual environments typically contain hundreds if not thousands of VMs.
With the lower amount of VMs as we have seen in the past, the data protection
scenario can be thought of as somewhat manageable, however given the more recent
higher VM counts we have witnessed today, data protection of the environment is no
trivial task.
Balancing limits on VM growth due to data protection requirements and the
expansion requirements requested from business units to cloud administrators is a
daunting challenge. Oftentimes the environment continues to grow but portions are
left unprotected or protected with less than ideal processes in place.
EMC® Avamar® and it’s integration with the VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data
Protection (VADP), addresses and removes these constraints for VMware
environments. Avamar’s data deduplication technology seamlessly integrates into
virtual environments, providing rapid backup capabilities utilizing the Changed Block
Tracking (CBT) feature within the API.
As we all know, backup is performed for one reason and that is recovery. The ability to
restore data from backup as fast as possible is paramount to your business.
Introduced since the Avamar 6.0 release, the CBT process is now leveraged to speed
the restore process as well assuring you recover your VMs to production in minutes.
Couple this with our newly introduced VM Instant Access capability in Avamar 7.0 or
later, for those customers leveraging the flexibility of EMC Data Domain System
integration, the ability to boot and run a VM from the backup image in seconds is now
also an option.
Another important factor to consider in a virtualized backup solution is a robust,
flexible, yet easy-to-use backup and recovery management interface. Avamar
continues to provide robust integration of live vSphere client data within the main
Avamar Administrator UI. In our latest release, to better reduce operational expenses
and enhance cross-functional operations in typical data center, Avamar has
introduced management functionality embedded within the native vSphere Client
interface making backup and recovery management possible from the VMware
administrator perspective while still retaining backup administrator control over

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schedule and retention policies. Couple this with the ability for providing individual
VM owners with the ability to complete self service restores without making a restore
request, you can accelerate your reduction in overall backup and recovery operational
overhead.
Avamar’s proven deduplication process along with these latest enhancements result
in vastly less data traversing the virtual and physical network, and greatly reduces the
amount of data being physically stored – translating into realized capital savings and
operational benefits for protecting and recovering virtualized environments and their
data.

Audience
The white paper assumes the reader has a general understanding of the basic
concepts and technologies behind EMC Avamar and VMware, and is intended for
systems engineers, technical architects, implementation specialists, technical
consultants, and individuals interested in leveraging the integration of currently
shipping products and emerging technologies.

Introduction
This whitepaper provides an overview of the features implemented in Avamar for fast,
efficient, and secure backups of VMware virtual environments. This paper will
particularly emphasize the newly introduced features for virtual environment data
protection introduced in Avamar 6.0.
There are essentially two methods of employing Avamar for virtual machine backup:
• Guest-level backup
• Image-level backup via VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP)
While Guest-level backup may provide the necessary solutions for some virtual cloud
environments, the Image-level backup feature leveraging the VADP feature set from
VMware is where the maximum benefit can be achieved when leveraging Avamar.
This is especially true in larger virtual cloud environments where scale and backup
windows are the ultimate concern. Avamar allows for both guest-level and image-level
backups to run simultaneously, allowing the administrator greater flexibility and
efficiency of deployment in their particular environment’s use case.
For the scope of this paper we will concentrate mostly on the features implemented
via VADP to enable Image-level VM backups and restores.
The reader should familiarize himself with the following terms used throughout this
document in the context of backup and recovery.
• A virtual machine (VM) houses the production data in its virtual
environment.

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 This solution was tested in an enterprise environment, so ESX® Server was
used as the VMware platform. Virtualization allows customers to reduce IT
costs while improving efficiency, availability, flexibility, and manageability of
their environment.
• Datastore is a VMware term for the storage that is added to house VMware
File Systems (VMFS). The VMFS holds all of the files needed to leverage virtual
machines.
• A VMDK file is a VMware image file that has the data that will be accessed by
the application that runs in this VM. It is where the operating system and
application are installed along with the data for the respective application.
• Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a new VMkernel feature that keeps track
of the storage blocks of virtual machines as they change over time. The
VMkernel keeps track of block changes on virtual machines, which enhances
the backup process for applications that have been developed to take
advantage of VMware’s new vStorage APIs.
• VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) enable backup
software to perform centralized virtual machine backups without the
disruption and overhead of running backup tasks from inside each virtual
machine.
• EMC Avamar is a deduplication backup and recovery software and system
solution. It embodies client deduplication that eliminates data from backup
streams before it crosses the network. Savings are realized on bandwidth,
storage, and backup windows.
• EMC Avamar Data Store is a bundled EMC solution that combines Avamar
software and EMC hardware in a preconfigured, turnkey solution for simplified
ordering, installation, and service. The Avamar Data Store scales from a single
node to a multi-node solution in order to meet the needs of remote offices to
data centers.

Avamar: Efficient Data Protection for VMware

Environments.
Guest-level Backup & Restore
With the guest backup option client agents are deployed in the same manner as an
Avamar solution is implemented for physical server backup. The Avamar client
package is installed on each individual virtual machine and backups are sent to the
Avamar server via the VMs virtual network interface. Just as with physical servers,
specific configuration may need to be done via application specific plugins to support

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various application consistent backups supported via the agents installed on each
client.
As shown in Figure 1 below, the same efficiencies apply as is observed with physical
server backup using Avamar, however naturally in this use case, the savings are in
virtual resources allocated to the VM, not physical client hardware resources.

Figure 1: Client Resource Usage for Traditional vs. Avamar Backups

Some of the highlighted advantages to the Guest-level feature set:

• Highest level of data deduplication
• Support for backup of applications inside the virtual machines
• Application consistent backups
• Support for partial or file-level restores
• Identical backup methods for physical and virtual machines
• No requirement for advanced scripting or VMware software knowledge
• Unchanged day-to-day procedures for backing up

Image-level Backup & Restore

With the image based backup option EMC Avamar integrates with VMware’s vStorage
API for Data Protection, a feature set within the vSphere server to offload the backup
processing overhead from the client to a backup proxy server running as a VM. This
proxy server can communicate with the vCenter server to mount a snapshot of a
particular VM’s vmdk to perform image level backup of that virtual machine. With this
method deduplication is provided on the file level as well as on the .vmdk level.

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Performing an image-level backup of a VMDK, the ability to execute a bare metal
restore replacing a VM instance or creating a separate instance is also possible and
supported. VMs protected via Image-level in Avamar 6.0 can reside on NFS, iSCSI, or
SAN storage.
Given the scalability and sheer explosion in the size of some VM environments the
workload burden placed on one proxy server can quickly build up. In this scenario,
the recommendation is to provision multiple proxies to handle the combined
workload and increase the amount of parallelism occurring when performing VADP
processes. With the provisioning of two proxy servers, we can now perform the VADP
process on two VMs simultaneously for backup by Avamar. Previously, VMs were
assigned manually by the administrator to specific proxy servers to assure proper
load balancing. With the latest enhancements introduced within Avamar, this load
balancing occurs natively. Avamar will now utilize any idle proxy server to
automatically load balance workload and maximize parallelism through the backup
process.
While offloading the backup-processing overhead from the client under backup to a
proxy server provides a lot of benefit, the usage of a proxy alone does not introduce
efficiencies and intelligence needed to reduce the amount of data blocks which are
scanned and processed by that proxy server.
To introduce further efficiency into the VMware image backup process, Avamar fully
utilizes the power of VADPs “Changed Block Tracking” (CBT) feature. As depicted in
Figure 3 below, leveraging CBT allows the VM Image Proxy to query the vSphere
environment and obtain an intelligent list of which blocks have changed on a specific
VM since the last backup.
Therefore, Avamar will only scan and process blocks which are included in the
“changed-block” list provided by the CBT mechanism within vSphere. This greatly
reduces the backup time of a given VM image and is the cornerstone of Avamar’s
ability to process large numbers of VMs within a particular given backup window.

Figure 2: Avamar VM Image Backup Utilizing Changed-Block Tracking

(CBT)

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Prior to Avamar 6.0, Restore operations were an “all-or-nothing” implementation as
depicted in Figure 3. When restoring a particular VM image from a backup within
Avamar, the entire VMDK would need to be sent over the network and restored.
Recovery of only the individual changed blocks since the last backup within that VM
image was not possible. With the introduction of Avamar 6.0, CBT is now leveraged by
Avamar software to introduce more efficient and lightning-fast restores.

Figure 3: Avamar VM Image Restore Classic Scenario (non-CBT)

Some of the highlighted advantages to this VMware Image backup feature set:
• Provides full image backups of running virtual machines
• Utilizes efficient transport (SCSI hotadd), which avoids copying the entire vmdk
image over the network
• Provides file-level restores from image-level backups for Windows
• Deduplicates within and across all .vmdk files protected by Avamar
• Uses changed block tracking for faster backups & restores.
• Minimizes network traffic by deduplicating and compressing data
• Eliminates the need to manage backup agents in each virtual machine for most
scenarios
• Leverages proxy server load balancing to achieve parallelism for superior backup
throughput

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VM Recovery Flexibility: Avamar VM Instant Access and Changed-
Block Tracking for Restore

As mentioned briefly in the previous section of this document, Avamar provides for
the fastest recovery possible for virtual machines in the industry. We will now take a
look at how Avamar makes this possible in more detail.
When a VM Recovery is executed on a particular vmdk, as depicted in Figure 4,
Avamar will query the vCenter via VADP to determine which blocks have changed
since the recovery point chosen, and then only recover or replace those blocks within
the VM image file. This reduces data transfer traffic within the vSphere environment
traversing the wire during a restore operation, and more importantly reducing the
restore time objective (RTO) of a Virtual Machine Image.
To further add to this intelligence, the Avamar software will automatically evaluate
the workload between both restore methods (Full Image Restore, or a recovery
leveraging CBT) and perform which method will result in the fastest restore times. This
is particularly useful in the scenario where the change rate since the last backup on a
VM being restored is very high and the overhead of a CBT analysis operation would be
more costly than a direct full image recover. Avamar will intelligently decide which
deployment method will result in the fastest VM Image recovery times for your
particular scenario or enviornment.

Figure 4: Avamar VM Image CBT for Restore Scenario

There are some use cases however, where the typical SLA that a CBT based recovery
provides is not sufficient enough. Certain VMs running mission critical applications
need to be brought online immediately with no time to spare waiting for a full Avamar
Recovery leveraging VMware CBT.
Avamar’s integration with vCenter database structure provides the backup
administrator with the flexibility for different VM recovery options. A VM backup can
be restored to the same VM instance from which the backup was taken or, we can
perform a re-directed restore and create an entirely new VM instance within vCenter.
All of the steps required to create the VM entry within vCenter have been done for you

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through this integration with Avamar. Once the recovery is complete, the only
remaining step is to power on the VM that was created from the recovery process.

Figure 5: Ability to recover .vmdk files to different storage

As shown in Figure 7, Avamar even gives you the flexibility to deploy a re-directed
restore of a VM to a different VM data store entirely.
In our latest release of Avamar, recovery flexibility is further extended through our
integration with EMC Data Domain systems to allow the administrator to boot and run
a VM in production directly from the Backup image. This allows for critical time access
for the most important of mission critical applications. Let’s now take a closer look at
how this is implemented.

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 Figure 6: Running a VM from Backup W/ VM Instant Access

We will use the illustration in Figure 5 as a reference for walking through a VM Instant
Access recovery workflow. In this example, we have 3 VMs, all 3 run mission critical
Java applications. Unfortunately, “VM3” experienced some partial corruption and is
currently unavailable. At this point, the backup administrator can exercise two
options in the combined Avamar/Data Domain solution, leverage a full recovery back
to the production VMFS datastore as described above, or orchestrate a VM Instant
Access operation. For this illustration, we will go ahead and bring the VM back online
to the end users immediately and boot it directly from last-night’s backup image. As
you can see, our VM backup image is currently protected on the Data Domain system
enabling us to leverage this feature.
From the Avamar Administrator UI as shown in Figure 7 below, an Instant Access
operation is requested for last night’s backup.
The following steps will automatically be kicked into motion:
1. Avamar orchestrates the creation of an NFS Datastore via an NFS Export of the
VM Backup Image stored on Data Domain
2. Avamar interfaces with the vCenter environment automatically to create a new
VM entry in the appropriate VM database, along with all VM system state and
configuration files associated with the VM being recovered.
3. VM is now ready for power-on and boot-up.
Since Avamar automatically integrated with vCenter to create the virtual machine
entry as described earlier in this section, the administrator simply just executes a
power on of the newly added VM. End-users of the Java application running inside
this VM can now resume operations as normal.

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 Figure 7: Avamar Administrator UI Instant Access Option

While the VM is now running from the Backup, Avamar does not overwrite the original
backup image. Any new I/O to the VM running from the backup goes into a separately
tracked VM snapshot file. In order to complete the recovery of the VM to production
storage, the administrator can leverage the normal vSphere interface to easily
execute a Storage vMotion from the temporary NFS datastore export on Data Domain
to the production VMFS datastore location.
The key to this use case is that rather than waiting for a full restore to production
storage that takes only minutes, the administrator can literally bring back a downed
application from backup storage in a much shorter timeframe. Also, with the tight
integration with VMware APIs this entire process is completed in seconds and is very
easily managed and orchestrated, just takes a couple of clicks.

VM Data Protection Management: Avamar vCenter Integration

Avamar provides several unique integration capabilities with VMware’s vCenter
management utility. The first is the integration through vCenter APIs which allows the
Avamar Administrator UI to routinely query a single instance or group of vCenter
instances, and provide key data protection information that will simplify management
of backup and recovery activities.

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 Figure 8: Determine a data protection approach by virtual machine

One of the important features possible with this management integration with
vCenter as shown in Figure 7 above, is the ability to quickly see from the backup
software user-interface the current protection status of each VM on a vCenter server,
which is imported into the Avamar environment. This saves the backup administrator
the trouble of having to correlate backup policies with newly created VMs that the
application administrators are deploying. Most likely, this would be done by cross
correlating the backup policy management UI with VMware’s vCenter client UI. Now,
the backup administrator, or even the application administrator (with the correct
Avamar management permissions assigned) can be given access to the Avamar
administrator UI and quickly assure that newly deployed VMs are indeed protected
under policy and exactly which policy is protecting them.
By implementing these features, the Avamar vCenter integration provides all
administrators with the easiest and most efficient visibility into the current state of
VM data protection.
Key benefits and features of Avamar vCenter integration include:
• Discovery of VMs and their associated groups in the Avamar UI
• Ability to add individual VMs or groups and define “ image” and/or “guest”
backup policies
• Ability to define multiple VMware Image Proxies
• Ability to initiate VM image or guest backup/restore operations
• Ability to monitor backup/restore operations in the Activity Monitor
• Ability to view VM protection status (guest, image, or none)
• Simple views of whether VMs have been backed up or not; and the simple
ability to remediate by quickly adding unprotected VMs to a backup policy
group.
• Automatically adding a backup policy to virtual machines as they are added

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VM Data Protection Management: EMC Avamar Plug-In for vSphere
Web Client
The second major integration Avamar provides within VMware’s vCenter ecosystem is
the ability to install the Avamar Plug-In for vSphere Web Client. This is a plug-in that
enables a VM Administrator with access to the vSphere Web UI, to take direct control
of, and monitor Avamar backup and recovery for VMs within that specific vCenter
environment.

Figure 9: EMC Avamar Plug-In for vSphere Web Client Home Screen

As shown here in Figure 9, the plug-in brings Avamar orchestration natively within the
vSphere UI as an added sub-menu option. From this main interface, the administrator
can go ahead and create backup policies, and orchestrate VM restores quickly. The
biggest value add this Avamar plug-in for vSphere brings for IT staff is significant
savings and efficiencies with no requirement to train VM administrators in new
backup and recovery tools and interfaces. Avamar functionality is incorporated
directly in the user interface style VM administrators are already familiar and
comfortable with.
More critical to an IT staff is the ability to empower application administrators to
perform data and system recovery with minimal intervention and dependency on the
backup team. In a VMware scenario, the ability to empower the VM Administrator to
perform his or her own VM image recoveries is a foundation design point in bringing
this management flexibility to Avamar customers. As shown below in Figure 10, it is

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easy to leverage the plug-in to do just that, this plug-in provides all of Avamar’s
efficient recovery features at the VM Administrator’s fingertips.

Figure 10: EMC Avamar plug-in for vSphere Web Client Restore Tab

While being able to orchestrate backups and recoveries efficiently is critically

important to IT organizations, it is also equally important that all members of the IT
team have a unified view of the operational status. Within the context of the same
plug-in Avamar provides in the vSphere interface for executing VM backup and
recovery operations, the same administrator can take the initiative independent of
the backup administrator to gain insight into reporting metrics of the Avamar
solution. As you can see in figure 11 below, from the “Reports” tab the VM
administrator can also quickly look into system space utilization, along with the
status of any scheduled or on-demand VM backup and restore jobs. All of this
information is displayed within the management constructs and terminology of the
vSphere workflow, so as all information is clear and concise in a language and style
the VM Administrator understands right away. With this dashboard style display, an
Administrator can quickly identify if any regular backups have failed or, if there are
any VMs which have not been backed up entirely.

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 Figure 11: EMC Avamar Plug-In for vSphere Web Client Reports Tab

As you can see using either the Avamar Administrator UI or the vSphere Web UI, both
administrators are able to view consistent data metrics and status across the entire
VM backup and recovery policy set. Consistency across these various management
interfaces which are tailored for different administration styles bring the added
benefit of clear and concise information sharing between IT roles that otherwise
would be time consuming to and involve human interaction to maintain. Clearly in
today’s globally distributed IT environments providing tools to enhance or eliminate
the need for verbal or written communication for coordination clearly provides cost
savings, reduced risk, and operational efficiencies.

Conclusion
With the ever-increasing demands placed on virtual cloud infrastructures via new IT-
as-a-service deployments, the need to protect the environments with some sort of
data protection scheme still remains. Employing traditional backup methods to the
virtual environment may be sufficient at the onset, however as the environment
quickly grows in size, backup windows begin to be largely unmanageable.
Avamar has implemented the VMware features described in this paper and is already
providing customers today with a more efficient VMware backup and recovery
solution.

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Avamar 7 extends the improvement in backup process efficiency for VM backups, and
continues to build upon its industry leading VM backup feature set with tighter
integration and backup process management options for both the Backup and VM
administrator. With features detailed in this whitepaper, EMC Avamar is continues to
lead the industry in innovation making backup and restores for virtual environments
more efficient and more importantly faster, allowing for worry-free and cost-effective
expansion.

References
• VMware product pages on VMware.com
• Avamar Product Page on EMC.com
• Powerlink®, EMC’s customer- and employee-only extranet (registration
required)

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