The factors that influence the design of the backup and recovery of a virtual data center are the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The RPO defines the amount of data loss that is acceptable. The RTO is the amount of time it should take to restore an application or service a workload after an outage.
The acceptable RPO and RTO should be defined for each workload. It is important to consider the application's dependencies when determining the RPO and RTO. Specifically, the RTO of an application will depend on the RTO of all of the application's dependencies. For example, if an application depends on a database server and the RTO of the database server is determined to be two hours, the RTO of the application itself cannot be less than two hours if the outage affects both the server running the application and the database server that supports the application.
vSphere provides many options that provide the continued operation of the virtual machines and the workloads they run in the event of an outage. These solutions do not replace the need for virtual machine backups.
The following are two different methods for backing up virtual machine workloads:
- Traditional backup using in-guest backup agents
- Agentless backup using the vSphere Storage APIs-Data Protection
The backup and recovery design should not only include virtual machines but also the backups of the virtual infrastructure configuration containing the management, network, and other configurations. This ensures that the virtual infrastructure can be restored after a failure within the infrastructure, such as a host failure or a vCenter failure.
This chapter will cover backing up vSphere infrastructure components. This includes backing up the ESXi host and the virtual distributed switch configurations to ensure that the infrastructure can be restored in the event of an outage.
VMware provides several products to protect virtual machines and recover them in the event of a virtual machine or infrastructure failure. This chapter demonstrates many of these options, including the deployment and basic configurations for the protection and recovery of virtual machines. The backup and recovery solution that will be selected will depend on the design factors.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Backing up ESXi host configurations
- Configuring ESXi host logging
- Backing up virtual distributed switch configurations
- Deploying Veeam Backup and Replication
- Using Veeam backup and replication to back up virtual machines
- Replicating virtual machines with vSphere replication
- Protecting the virtual data center with Site Recovery Manager