I’m curious for feedback from folks using VMware Data Protection (VDP) – whether it’s VDP, or VDP Advanced. Please give you feedback – comment freely!
In the recent Avamar 7 release, It’s great to see the work to embed directly into vCenter (VDP’s central design is to be nearly “invisible” under the covers, and natural in the VMware admin’s context) is now available for VDP’s “bigger brother”, Avamar.
This means if you need more “oomph” (in terms of number of VMs, performance, replication, and tight app integration), but love the “yup, right embedded in vCenter”, you can have it.
While at the recent EMC “Backup to the Future” launch (which also included face-melting bumps in Data Domain performance – 2x - and scale - 5x) we had a little fun in the “5280 ft drop of death” below (it really is quite funny, and yes, we did drop stuff out of planes), there’s an important message about what I see happening with protection.
….Frankly – I agree with Steve Manley (BRS CTO). I think “backup” (and perhaps backup administration) as a separate thing is just going to disappear – and just fold into the applications. Frankly the startup that I was in that was acquired (bringing me into EMC) was on this path – storage and recovery belongs in the APP, not as a separate thing.
VMware admins will do it via vCenter and vCAC. Oracle DBAs will do it via RMAN and OEM. SAP Admins will do it via LVM. Ultimately, tenants will do it in whatever is their cloud portal. Below the covers, various techniques (capacity-optimized, deduplicated, spun down, snapshots, replicas, heck wall-to-wall USB sticks) will be used to persist the backups and archives.
I’ve said it before – the best infrastructure is invisible… So – hey, if you’re an Avamar customer – a great upgrade! If you’re a VDP customer – you can see the direction we’re going. Would love feedback!!!
Love VDP. I had problems with disk.enableuuid=enable and from time to time it would just lock a vmdk but I am sold by the concept, hope they can iron out all the kink soon. Also I am not a fan on file level backup restore process requiring adobe flash, I don't install flash or any unnecessary software on my server (especially adobe product) so it is annoying process to do file level restore. But like I said I am sold by the concept and I can be patient.
Posted by: Totie Bash | July 12, 2013 at 01:58 PM
Early on I heard feedback from one of my customers that VMware support was not really up to speed on supporting the new VDP as compared to VDR. They were having occasional "hiccups", and the answer from VMware support was typically delete the appliance and re-deploy it because support couldn't (or didn't know how to) do any in-depth troubleshooting. That was 4-6 months ago now so I would hope that's been corrected.
Posted by: INDStorage | July 16, 2013 at 11:44 AM
Hi Chad,
We deploy vdp in our customer, the speed just incredible and the backup size good too but can't we manage the schedule?, like in VM 1 I want backup at 12, VM 2 at 2....but it's disaster when I try to place the backup in datadomain, it's not work but if I using vnx for backup datastore it really great...
Posted by: demhyt | July 25, 2013 at 06:52 AM
@Totie - thanks for the feedback - will make sure the product team gets the feedback.
@INDStorage - thanks! I heard that in the early days - that's not uncommon when something is new. I haven't heard it in a long time.
@demhyt - thanks for the feedback - can you drop me an email, will help with the problem.
Posted by: Chad Sakac | July 25, 2013 at 04:22 PM
VDP kind of works, but its quite impossible to see, what it does. VDP tasks in vCenter sit always at 92% and you are left to wonder if they finish on time or not. If backup task finishes then you just get the notice that something failed. Which VM failed to back up you must go and see at the admin console and why... you must go and search inside the log files. Sometimes tasks are not displayed at all on vCenter and they come back after VDP restart. Sometimes there are left behind partial snapshot files, *-delta* only, which I can get ride of only by migrating VM to another datastore.
Also you can schedule backups either every day of week or only one day of week. No pliancy here.
And speed... we have 5 VDP's and with smaller VM's we don't have problems but backup jobs with bigger ones (200...500GB) are leaving VM's sometimes out of date because they can't finish backup with their 16h backup window which is maximum time.
Posted by: markko | August 06, 2013 at 08:31 AM
VDP 5.5 is an amazing product
I have 2 appliances in ISCSI, stored in 2 separate buildings for offsite storage.
One does monthly, the other Daily and weekly
We have 50 servers broken into 4 pools under VMware, each pool starts up at a different time to not overload the system.
With deduplication the Daily/Weekly server storage is 10 Terabytes, but only takes 1 TB of physical space due to deduplication of the 6 daily, 4 weekly rotation
Posted by: Dimitri | May 06, 2014 at 01:56 PM