Introduction
It never ceases to amaze me just how many organisations fail to employ best practices in their backup regime. As a former solutions architect tasked with designing and architecting storage and virtual data centres, backup always needed to be treated as just as crucial as the primary workloads it is there to protect.
Certainly, in the realm of VMware backup, achieving optimal data protection while maintaining operational efficiency is paramount and leveraging industry best practices as well as vendor-supplied best practices can help achieve better backup performance, reduction in backup windows and enhanced security. As a leader in providing organisations with superior virtual machine backup, BDRSuite has its own set of best practices that can be used to achieve these gains specifically for ESXi backup.
While there are many different best practices (and a lot of them apply to just any environment), here are just five best practices that are generally relevant for any backup environment with BDRSuite.
BP 1: Smart Balancing and Smart Scheduling
To ensure you do not put your primary workloads at risk of hitting performance issues, it is highly recommended that you separate your backup server from any mission-critical servers you have in the BDRSuite environment to guarantee smoother job execution.
If one of these servers is hosting mission-critical services as well as the backup service, and a backup is kicked off (which no doubt needs to also backup this mission-critical workload) – it is inevitably going to cause a huge performance impact to the overall backup window and put the mission-critical server at risk of crashing. By balancing your backups between separate compute resources, and not coupling the backup duty with other servers in the environment servicing other requirements, you can minimise any performance impact to any important servers.
BP 2: Exclusion Management
By excluding virtual machines, virtual disks, or even essential flat files, organisations using BDRSuite can achieve notable savings in both time and storage capacity during the backup process. One of the standout features in BDRSuite revolves around Disk Exclusion, which empowers those organisations to selectively exclude certain disk types at either the host or virtual machine level. This practice plays a vital role in enhancing backup efficiency, curbing storage expenses, and preventing unnecessary restoration of unneeded or non-critical data.
It’s important to ensure that your exclusion choices remain consistent with the applicable industry or legal regulations concerning data retention. Some data could be subject to specific retention periods. While safeguarding such data might be necessary initially, there could come a point when that data is no longer required.
BP 3: Application-Aware Smart Backups
Not all virtual machines and workloads are created equal, and luckily BDRSuite has been built to understand specific applications when creating backups by a feature called application-aware backup processing. This means the backup solution coordinates with the application to quiesce (pause) its processes temporarily to ensure that data is captured in a consistent state. This step prevents data corruption or incomplete backups.
A best practice for application-aware image processing within BDRSuite involves optimising the backup and recovery processes to ensure consistency, reliability, and efficiency while dealing with various applications and their data. Application-aware image processing recognises the specific applications running within virtual machines and ensures that their data is captured and restored accurately during backup and recovery operations.
By following these best practices, you can ensure that your application-aware image processing with BDRSuite is optimised to provide accurate, consistent, and reliable backups and restores for your most critical applications.
BP 4: Optimal Storage Provisioning Strategy
Maintaining separate storage for backup jobs is important, keeping them distinct from production data so that production workloads can keep ticking along without any disturbances. Production and backup operations have different resource requirements. Separating them ensures that each process receives the resources it needs to excel. Production workloads thrive with ample processing power and memory, while backup operations thrive on optimal disk performance and network bandwidth.
Imagine a bustling factory floor – the heartbeat of production. Now, envision a dedicated storage area where backup processes quietly hum along, unnoticed. By keeping backup and production data on separate storage systems, you’re ensuring that your production workflows can continue undisturbed. Think of it as a dance – while one partner takes a step back, the other gracefully leads. In this case, the backup data gracefully backs up, leaving the production data free to keep the show going.
In the heat of the moment, when data restoration is the call of the hour, every second counts. Separate storage for backup jobs optimises the restoration process. The absence of interference from production workloads translates into swifter and more efficient data recovery. This not only minimises downtime but also keeps the wheels of your business turning without prolonged interruptions.
BP 5: Increase Data Security Through Encryption.
I want to emphasise that AES-256-bit encryption significantly bolsters the security of your data in two crucial ways: while it’s at rest and when it’s in transit.
The concept of “at rest” protection signifies that, even if someone manages to gain unauthorised access to the physical storage devices, they won’t be able to decipher the data unless they possess the encryption key. To ensure the utmost security for your data, it’s imperative to implement encryption algorithms that adhere to industry standards, along with employing effective key management practices.
Furthermore, it’s equally important to encrypt data while it’s being moved between the source and the backup repository. This measure prevents any unauthorised parties from intercepting and accessing the data during its transmission. To accomplish this, employing protocols like SSL/TLS to safeguard data transfer over networks is highly recommended.
With the utilisation of BDRSuite, you can establish encryption during the configuration of backup schedules or directly through the Settings tab within the main interface. This empowers you to take control of your data security and encryption preferences seamlessly.
With BDRSuite, you can set up encryption during backup schedule configuration or via the Settings tab in the main BDRSuite interface, Keep in mind this is turned off by default and like anything implementing encryption may have a minor performance impact on the backup window within the environment.
In closing
In the ever-evolving world of data management, the importance of leveraging industry best practices for your backups cannot be overstated. This practice serves as a means to further optimise backup performance, enhance security, and get a higher ROI out of your backup infrastructure.
Check out the BDRSuite Best Practices document here and their ESXi backup page here
