As server virtualisation assumes a greater role in the enterprise, administrators face a proliferation of virtual machines residing on the same physical server. Each virtual machine uses a portion of the physical machine's processing, memory and I/O resources. Ideally, server virtualisation provides a means of increasing hardware utilisation.
But as more "logical" servers are consolidated into fewer "physical" computer systems, it's important to protect each virtual machine's data against failure or loss. Virtual servers are the key to providing this protection. This article examines how virtual server backup can be achieved using a mix of traditional backup techniques and specialised virtualisation tools. It also highlights important deployment issues.
What is virtual server backup?
A virtual machine is a complete logical environment existing as a separate entity on a physical server. Each virtual machine is treated and perceived as if it is physical. In fact, a user cannot tell the difference between a real and virtual machine. A data centre may host thousands of virtual machines running on only a fraction of that much hardware, and this presents a serious problem for storage or backup administrators. Data loss on a virtual server can be just as catastrophic as data loss on a physical server, so every virtual server must be backed up as part of a company's backup regimen.
Virtual server backups can be accomplished using a traditional approach with conventional backup software. The backup software is simply installed and configured on each virtual machine, and backups will run normally to any conventional backup target, including tape drives, virtual tape libraries (VTL) or disk storage. "That's probably the most popular way that people do it today because it's familiar," says Lauren Whitehouse, analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "It ensures a consistent backup; it will give you the granular recovery that you're looking for, and it's application-specific."
However, applying traditional backup tactics to virtual server backups does have drawbacks. The most significant problem is resource contention. Backups demand significant processing power, and the added resources needed to execute a backup may compromise the performance of that virtual machine and all virtual machines running on the system. "Don't go for 100% utilisation," says Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at the Storage IO Group. Leave some server resources unused to accommodate backup tasks and stagger backup processes so that only one virtual machine is being backed up on any physical system at one time.
Backup process more costly in virtualised environments
Server Virtualization: Server virtualization utilizes regular physical equipment to have virtual machines. A physical host machine could have any number of virtual machines running on it with the goal that one arrangement of equipment is utilized to run diverse machines. Virtual machines can be introduced with their own particular working framework and their own distinctive arrangement of utilizations; the working frameworks or applications don't should be the same over the virtual machines.
For that hardware virtualisation is more beneficial to handle all servers together and provide data from data centre of server to user virtual desktop.
Virtualization is a technology that creates an abstract version of a complete operating environment including a processor, memory, storage, network links, and a display entirely in software. Because the resulting runtime environment is completely software based, the software produces what’s called a virtual computer or a virtual machine (M.O., 2012). To simplify, virtualization is the process of running multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine. The virtual machines share the resources of one physical computer, and each virtual machine is its own environment.
Backup copies are processes that are used to save information. It is to say, a user wants to save all the information or part of the information available on the PC up to this moment; will make a backup copy in such a way that it will save the information in some technologically available storage, the urgent care clinic, the Systems area has two of the Servers as Backups administrator (Allen 2004)[2]; for later if a loss occurs in the computer equipment of one of the users and information is lost, from the Systems area the process of restoring the information to the date of the last backup made by the end user can be performed. In order for the process to be functional, users must periodically complete the process according to the indications given by the Systems
Data centers have seen many different types of storage thought years from huge drums to tapes to today’s flash storage. Many of today’s data centers uses some form of RAID on a SAN to house the network’s storage. Virtualization has also help change how data center use and manage storage because before a data center would have many different hard drives for each system but with the RAID as being a part of virtualization, data centers can have multiple hard drive but act as one hard drives. In addition to RAID, virtualize storage has also open the door to off-site “Cloud” based storage for data centers to utilize. Today, data centers can have on-site virtualize servers but have the servers’ hard drives be located on a “cloud” base storage platform as the main storage location or even a backup location for the servers’
Virtualization is nothing but the simulation of many virtual machines on single computer hardware environment by using virtualization software such as VMware. Virtualization software is installed on computer system an...
From our research we can describe Cloud computing as both a platform and a type of application. The Cloud computing platform offers, configures, reconfigures and provisions hardware and software services as needed. Server equipment in the cloud can be physical or virtual machines. Clouds in actuality also offer storage area networks (SANs), network equipment, firewall and other security devices. Cloud computing refers to applications that are not stored or ran from the local systems, but that exist on the cloud and are accessed remotely. Any user with suitable internet connection and standard browser can access a pool of virtualized computer resources in the cloud.
... all of your different hosts and handle the conversion and routing of data between the servers and their virtual disks.
The days of the old-fashioned computer dumb-terminals that connected to a mainframe computer which encompassed an entire room are long gone. Most college students weren’t even born yet at the height of the mainframe computer generation. Desktop virtualization is the latest and greatest emerging technology that calls for a reinvention, of sorts, of those dumb-terminals. Although no universal definition of what a virtual desktop is exists yet, the basic idea is that one server or a number of servers run the application software that the business user connects to. The physical desktop does not run the application itself as it resides on the server.
Computer hardware can be a very expensive thing. As technology rapidly continues to advance, the need to provide more services and applications without breaking the budget has helped propel the field of computer virtualization. Since its creation in 1960, virtualization in the computer technology industry has been allowing companies to save money and resources, provides for an increased means of system resiliency, and allows for better ease of management.
As we all know virtualization is the requirement of future. We have evolved from the age of traditional environment to virtual environment.We have grown accustomed to almost all things virtual from virtual memory to virtual networks to virtual storage.The most widely leveraged benefit of virtualization technology is server consolidation, enabling one server to take on the workloads of multiple servers. For example, by consolidating a branch office’s print server, fax server, exchange server, and web server on a single windows server, businesses reduce the costs of hardware, maintenance, and staffing.
Virtualization technologies provide isolation of operating systems from hardware. This separation enables hardware resource sharing. With virtualization, a system pretends to be two or more of the same system [23]. Most modern operating systems contain a simplified system of virtualization. Each running process is able to act as if it is the only thing running. The CPUs and memory are virtualized. If a process tries to consume all of the CPU, a modern operating system will pre-empt it and allow others their fair share. Similarly, a running process typically has its own virtual address space that the operating system maps to physical memory to give the process the illusion that it is the only user of RAM.
Now days, many companies are coming forward with Application Virtualization concept for IT environments. Some big players of virtualization are VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix, etc. VMWare had already launched its VMWare ThinApp version 5.0 last October where as Microsoft has also including new role App-V in its Server 2012. Also Microsoft client operating system provides compatibility troubleshooting based on Application Virtualization Concept. Soon this concept will be widely used and replace tradition working environments.
...es running multiple OSs side-by-side on the same processing hardware. Intel has added new features such as hardware-assisted page-table management and directed I/O in the Core i7 processors and its chipsets that allow software to further improve their performance in virtualized environments. These improvements coupled with increases in memory bandwidth and processing performance allow engineers and scientists to build more capable and complex virtualized systems for test, measurement, and control.
A major difficulty with the virtual machine involves disk systems. For instance, the physical machine has two disk drives but wants to support five virtual machines. The physical machine is unable to allocate a disk drive to each virtual machine because the virtual machine software itself will need substantial disk space to provide virtual memory and spooling. To solve this dilemma, virtual drives that are identical in all respects except for size are provided. The system implements each virtual disk by allocating as many tracks on the physical disks as the virtual disk needs.