Essentials for Better

VM Protection

Your virtual servers have brought on a momentous shift in the way you process, store and protect your data. As you look to achieve the best ways to proactively protect your virtual machine (VM) environment, there are many things to consider.

Here are seven essentials for truly better VM protection that will minimize complexity, reduce risk and improve value.

A momentous SHIFT.

Every application and workload in your virtual environment is unique and the data protection you use should be customized to suit your different workload demands.

Apply a solution that will make sure that you meet the recovery and retention requirements for each separate VM workload, all in a single solution with a single application and without hidden costs.

1. Custom-fit protection for each workload.

When running data protection tasks on virtualized applications (such as SQL and Exchange), be sure that your VM protection solution performs background tasks to ensure that applications are protected in a consistent and rapidly recoverable state.

This will help you achieve granular recovery options for your protected applications, even when running in a virtual deployment.

2. Be application consistent.

Be sure that all of your VMs are protected by choosing a solution that supports VM auto discovery.

By automatically discovering newly created VMs and assigning them to a protection policy, you can be assured that all VM data is protected. This includes data on VMs that have been created since your last backup. It will reduce administrative effort and help to address “VM sprawl” when large numbers of VMs are created in a short time.

3. Automate VM discovery.

For the greatest recovery efficiency, select a VM protection solution that offers “live” VM recovery options to enable near immediate use of the virtual machine without waiting for the full VM to be recovered.

Then, further improve your user productivity with self-service access to protected data via a secure logical repository where data can be easily found and accessed through plug-ins to existing applications, web console, mobile apps or specialized portals.

4. Keep your recovery options open.

Achieve maximum VM backup efficiency with global source-side deduplication.

It will ensure that only unique data is backed up and network traffic is minimized during backup processes. This will also minimize the performance impact of backups on VMs, hosts and production applications.

5. Maximize your resources.

Regardless of how advanced your virtualization strategy is, you will continue to have physical infrastructure to protect. For optimum efficiency and reduced complexity consider a data protection solution that will support both your physical and virtual environments in a single solution.

With a holistic solution for all of your backup and recovery needs you can achieve a more agile and cost-effective infrastructure.

6. Use one tool across physical and virtual.

As your virtualized environment becomes increasingly complex, it may be time to reclaim wasted VM resources to make your virtual infrastructure more efficient.

Select a VM protection solution that will automatically identify idle or stale VMs and reclaim wasted CPU, memory, networking and storage resources through policy-based VM archiving.

7. Establish a VM retirement policy.

SUGGESTED READING

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To learn more about Commvault software can help achieve optimal server protection, please visit commvault.com/virtualization.