Pancetera – Replacing an End-of-Life* VMware VCB while Turbocharging VMware Backup

Imagine the Possibilities

Would you like to eliminate the proxy server, double copy, and staging storage need for VMware® VCB? Pancetera Unite enables you to streamline VCB environments across all supported backup applications because it is a self contained virtual appliance that requires no additional hardware to back up running virtual machines.

Since VMware has announced end-of-life, are you looking for options to replace VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)? Pancetera Unite is a drop-in solution that not only replaces VCB but also turbocharges the entire backup process.

Would you like to fully integrate your Virtual Machine backups with the rest of your system and data backups? Pancetera Unite enables you to eliminate clients while leveraging your existing backup system software, training, and policies.

VMware VCB Backup Challenges

Virtualization sprawl can put significant strain on backup processes:

  • Due to the ease of deployment of VMs their numbers can grow rapidly
  • Guest OS file system workloads can create severe contention for shared Disk, CPU, and Memory resources
  • Newly created VMs must be added to configuration policies in order to be properly managed and protected
  • Agent software must be installed within the Guest OS

VMware® VCB also has challenges:

  • The process involves moving the VMs twice on the network – first to the Proxy store then to the backup target.
  • Manual scripts or VMware-specific backup tools may be required to send a backup snapshot from the proxy server or staging area to the storage destination (tape or disk).
  • Backup time increases due to the time needed for snapshots and staging of VMs on the proxy server; backup cannot start until a VM snapshot is created and mounted on the proxy server. This can take up to thirty minutes per VM.
  • A separate physical proxy server machine and dedicated staging disk space is required.
  • The staging disk space must be large enough to accommodate the full size of all virtual disks that are backed up concurrently
  • The version of the NetWorker Client must be synchronized with the version of VCB
  • All VMware datastores containing VMs must be available to the proxy server for snapshots to work properly
  • A change to a VM name or IP address results in a failed or skipped backup
  • The entire virtual disk must be copied before the backup begins

Replace VMware VCB while Accelerating Backup

Pancetera Unite takes a different approach to backing up your virtual environment. It builds on existing backup software, setup, and administrator training: VM backup and recovery are performed with no modifications to either your virtualization or backup environment It builds on your existing backup processes, setup, and training as shown in the diagram below:

Agent elimination in VM’s
With Pancetera you can accelerate your VM backups while eliminating the Proxy Server and Proxy Storage

  • Any backup software on any OS that can mount a CIFS share or NFS export can see and access the Pancetera SmartView mount point, allowing one job to backup everything. All VMware data stores are consolidated including virtual machine file systems, disks, snapshots, and VMFS volumes. All data is accessible regardless of the data store or hypervisor used by a VM.
  • Further, no changes are required to your existing strategies for meeting regulatory requirements for data privacy, security, retention, protection, and accountability. Pancetera allows backup software to use multiple policies that concurrently pass through the SmartView namespace.
  • Pancetera SmartRead accelerates your VM backups and makes it more efficient to run. SmartRead is a set of algorithms that reduce storage I/O. By leveraging SmartRead, administrators can alleviate unnecessary reads from primary storage and read only the blocks required to perform these maintenance tasks.
  • VMware VCB requires that a full data copy is made to proxy storage associated with a proxy server. The proxy server must have access to a staging disk that is equivalent in size to a full image backup. Even a modestly-sized VMware deployment requires multiple physical proxy servers with dedicated storage for staging. White Pancetera, no proxy servers or staging are needed, which means less time, less hardware, less setup, and less management.

Since changes are not required to your existing backup software your regulatory compliance policies can continue to be used without change.

VCB End of Life

* VMware has announced that VCB will no longer be included with the vSphere 4.1 release. For a news article with more information, click here.

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