Backing Up Virtual Machines as Physical Machines

From the user’s perspective, the virtual machine operates just like a physical machine; it has a guest operating system in isolation from other VMs. It means that backup procedures for non-virtualized loads can manage the exact VMs.

System administrators can also install a backup agent and schedule backups just as they would for a regular machine. A VMware backup solution must be simple, without any learning curve, and allow administrators to exclude non-essential applications or data to reduce the backup size.

Yet, it only protects the operating system and applications, not the VM, so there is no way to restore the entire virtualized environment directly.

The issue with the virtual machines

As virtual machines became more important, applications migrated to virtual machines. Creating a large and tumultuous virtual machine like you treat all other virtual machines has become problematic.

The most common complaint in this area is when someone uses shallow backup access for virtualization with a busy virtualized Exchange server, and the virtual machine freezes for a few seconds. The whole dependent infrastructure becomes rash, and users start to complain.

Deep virtualization backup solves this. In the Virtual Backup, if you have thousands of virtual machines, you select a few with high conversion rates and protect those virtual machines with software that understands the applications and operating systems in the virtual machine.

Allows backup to run multiple granules without disturbing the environment or users. The side effect is that it will enable much better duplication than any other technique if you have content-conscious duplication. The storage backup administrator may be tempted to back up the physical machines’ virtual machines as regular files.

In this case, the organization would back up the VMDK to each virtual machine, a large disk file containing the configuration and data of the virtual machine. Great idea, but it might not work well. Unless the virtual machine shuts down, you can back up the data used, which will likely result in inconsistent data.

Backing up VMs

Backing up a VM image based on a hypervisor host block, ideally through a backup proxy server, is becoming the preferred way to back up virtual servers. The maturity of backup APIs in vSphere, Hyper-V, and XenServer, as well as the growing support for backup applications for these APIs combined with performance and scalability merits, are among the main reasons for its adoption.

Because most organizations operate more than one hypervisor and a mix of physical and virtual servers, multiple hypervisor support and the ability to support physical and virtual server backups are essential when choosing a virtual machine backup software.

Conclusion

The virtual machine is backed up by downloading a read-only copy of the files and operating system and storing each version for later revocation and recovery. The backups are more comprehensive and contain all the data and information needed to restore the VM, while the tape is the only copy of the data.