Pancetera – Turbocharging VMware Backup for EMC Legato NetWorker
Imagine the Possibilities
Would you like to create image backups of your running VMs with your existing EMC Legato NetWorker Client? Pancetera Unite enables you to automate this process in a matter of minutes.
Would you like to make backups of your VMs without having to install an EMC Legato NetWorker Client in each VM? Pancetera Unite enables you to eliminate clients while leveraging your existing EMC Legato NetWorker software, training, and policies.
Would you like to be able to coordinate the I/O load generated by autonomous EMC Legato NetWorker Clients in a very simple way? Pancetera Unite enables you to coordinate I/O loads by unifying all VMs into a single file view.
Would you like newly created VMs to be backed up automatically without changing your EMC Legato NetWorker configuration? Pancetera Unite enables you to automate processes by automatically discovering your new VMs and making them immediately available for backup.
Would you like to offload the work of doing an EMC Legato NetWorker backup and lower the impact on running VMs? Pancetera Unite enables you to offload production hosts by allowing you to run the backups from an ESX/vSphere host that is different than the host that the VM is running on.
Would you like to avoid having to take VMs offline just to make an image copy? Pancetera Unite enables you to offload production hosts by allowing you to run the backups from an ESX/vSphere host that is different than the host that the VM is running on.
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. For more information, please navigate to the VMware VCB page or click here.
EMC Legato NetWorker Backup Challenges in VMware Environments
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
NetWorker treats each VM as a physical server. With many VMs on a single host, all VMs compete for the same system resources: disk, CPU, memory, and network. As a result, backup processes most likely will impact production applications’ performance and could, in some cases, impact availability and reliability of production systems.
If you’re currently using NetWorker with VMware® VCB:
- 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
Enhance EMC Legato Networker in your Virtual Environment
Pancetera Unite takes a different approach to backing up your virtual environment.
Pancetera Unite takes a different approach to backing up your virtual environment. It builds on your existing NetWorker processes, setup, and administrator training; VM backup and recovery is performed with no modifications to either your virtualization or NetWorker environment. NetWorker clients 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 within your virtual environment. All VMware virtual storage—virtual machine file systems, disks, snapshots, and VMFS volumes—is consolidated. All data is accessible regardless of the datastore or hypervisor used by a particular VM, and restore operations are independent of VMware management tools. NetWorker is used to quickly restore data in a few easy steps.
No changes are required to your existing strategies for meeting regulatory requirements for data privacy, security, retention, protection, and accountability. Pancetera Unite allows Networker to use multiple policies that transparently access data through the SmartView namespace. Pancetera Unite builds on your existing EMC Legato NetWorker processes, setup, and training as shown in the diagram below:
- Backup and recovery of VMs are performed with no modifications to either your virtualization or EMC Legato NetWorker environments
- A single EMC Legato NetWorker Client installed on any computer that can mount a CIFS or NFS share is all that is need to backup all VMs
- All VMware storage elements—virtual machine file systems, disks, snapshots, and VMFS volumes—are consolidated regardless of storage topology and across multiple ESX/vSphere hosts
- Pancetera SmartRead reduces I/O load on primary and secondary storage used during the backup process
Since changes are not required to your existing backup software your regulatory compliance policies can continue to be used without change. Pancetera allows EMC Legato NetWorker to control parallel I/O by simply creating saveset definitions.
See How Pancetera Unite and NetWorker Work Together
An interactive demonstration of the two products working together is provided below:
Trial Version of Pancetera Unite
Pancetera is here to help today with a solution that integrates into your environment in minutes, while fully supporting your existing backup strategy. Sign up for a 30 Day Free Trial and see how we can help. Click Try Us Out to get started.
