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VMware has just announced version 5.8 of VDP Advanced that incorporates many new features. Here are the highlights:
VDP Advanced 5.8 adds support for database administrators who use Microsoft ® Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG) 2013/2010/2007 to improve availability of application data. VDP Advanced will protect Active and/or Passive copies based on the defined policy, where you can set the preference order for backups {Prefer Passive, Active, and Passive}. Prefer Passive backs up a passive copy of each database, if a healthy Passive copy is available. If not, then VDP Advanced backs up the Active copy, thus ensuring a backup is always completed. VDP Advanced also provides Granular Level Recovery (GLR) at the mailbox level.
VDP Advanced 5.8 provides comprehensive support for Microsoft ®SQL Clusters (AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Clusters), including the latest SQL Server 2014 release. SQL Server clustering increases the uptime of SQL Server. The main advantage of clustering is if the primary SQL Server fails on one cluster, the other cluster will immediately take over the operation, thus ensuring business continuity.The VDP Advanced cluster client enables you to backup and restore SQL Server data on shared storage in the cluster, regardless of which node is managing the data at the time of the backup or restore.There are numerous backup capabilities including Full, Incremental and Differential, along with many selective control options.
VDP Advanced 5.8 now supports up to 20 virtual appliances per vCenter to handle larger environments – up from 10 in the previous releases. Each virtual appliance dynamically scales up to 8TB and is managed separately. As environments grow we are seeing more customers taking advantage of VDP Advanced’s integration through DD Boost to EMC Data Domain systems for protection storage. This provides global deduplication, while providing higher efficiency for protection storage. Plus, Data Domain systems takes your backup data out of your production array, while offering the Data Invulnerability Architecture for extremely high reliability and recovery.
In order to increase backup throughput, VDP Advanced 5.8 will now use up to 8 proxies and 24 concurrent backup streams to shorten backup times. This is very helpful as environments continue to grow. This capability along with Changed Block Tracking makes VDP Advanced extremely efficient for VM backup and recovery.
Now VDP Advanced can replicate and restore anywhere; namelyrestore replicated backups to either primary or secondary DR site. Furthermore, replicated backup data can be replicated again, providing true bi-directional replication. Data is always deduplicated, compressed and encrypted before replication, thus minimizing impact on the network and securing the data in-flight.
VDP Advanced now supports Linux LVM, which is a logical volume manager for the Linux kernel that manages disk drives and similar mass-storage devices. It also supports Linux filesystem EXT4 that modifies important data structures of the filesystem such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features.
On a side note I would like to point out that VDP Advanced 5.5.6 (or later … i.e. v5.8) supports VMware’s Virtual SAN (VSAN), which has been available since vSphere 5.5 U1. This likely means that your backup data is in the same array as your production data, so be sure to take advantage of VDP Advanced’s replication capabilities to copy your backup data to a second site.
Best of all, only the unique changed data is replicated, so existing WAN bandwidth should suffice. You can use another VDP Advanced virtual appliance at the secondary site, or you can replicate to an Avamar Data Store. Many EMC business partners offer DRaaS, so you can replicate to their Avamar Data Store GRID … if you don’t want to buy your own.
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Jeff Hunter’s BLOG at VMware
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