Given the widespread success of virtualization, many SMBs rely exclusively on the inbuilt features as their main data protection plan and which may appear adequate at face value! One would need to see the overall picture! Virtual server based tools such as, snapshots and export/import utilities that are found in the major products, help organizations protect their data to a certain degree! It is not enough to backup data, being a clone or a file to the same virtual server. In fact, major manufacturers and their fellow partners provide a vast range of backup solutions that fulfill all requirements of a proper backup policy. With SMBs, the deciding factor may be costs! Do they have the budget to purchase such applications? However, for the unlucky IT techies that never manage to get their superiors buying these expensive products can still develop a similar mechanism. Using some basic scripting and inexpensive hardware they can build backup solutions similar to these expensive applications as they too, make use of the inbuilt or native tools found in the major virtualization products.

Basic setup  

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Virtual machines (VMs) are copied (cloned) to a remote computer (storage location) through the export functionality of the virtual server over a Gbit network connection. This can be performed overnight on a weekly or daily basis (depending on the function of your data). VMs can either be left in their exported format or successively imported locally to the computer as to verify their integrity. Additionally, the remote computer can be mounted as a local storage to the virtual server using the inbuilt NFS or iSCSI functionality. All you need is a good reference of the scripting commands available for your environment and the virtual server admin client application. The main cost of this setup is a computer with adequate storage space; say, two or three 1 TB SATA hard drives in a RAID configuration.

Advanced setup

This setup can perform the same tasks as the basic one plus more! Exported VMs to the central location can be successively imported to a second virtual server. This requires that the second server has sufficient free space to host the imported VMs (clones). In the event of a failure on server 1, the recovery time of any exported-imported VM is minimal as you only need to start the imported clone on server 2. The only additional task required would be, the restore operation of any data (at file level) that has changed since the last clone was done. For file data backups one would use the native backup utilities found in the major Operating Systems such as, NT backup for MS windows and Tar for Linux, running with scheduled jobs. Also, a faster alternate solution would be to connect both virtual servers as repositories of each other through NFS or iSCSI.

The suggested setups have some limitations and these are:

• Backups are done at an image level (clones) and not at file or folder level but this can be overcome through the free reliable solutions incorporated in the main operating systems.
• You need to shutdown the VM during an export procedure and hence, the backup process should happen after office hours but this would not be an option if the resource is required to be running 24/7. One would need to explore the snapshot functionality to overcome this setback.

Conclusion: – With what I call a high spec PC and a fast local network (Gbit NICs & switches – quite standard nowadays), the suggestions presented above can offer SMBs a backup and recovery solution without spending thousands of dollars. The same concept can applied between remote sites over a good Internet connection to provide a disaster recovery site. In the articles to come, I will be explaining some basic scripts that perform similar tasks in a typical virtual server environment.

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