Improving Backup and Recovery for VMware VSphere Environments

Data deduplication adoption has made impressive strides over the past two years, likely fueled by interest in disk-based backup and recovery, the impact of the economy on IT budgets, and the proliferation of server virtualization. EMC incorporates data deduplication as a native feature to deliver highly efficient backup and recovery - a must for rapidly expanding virtual server environments. EMC can accelerate the adoption of VMware since data protection is an imperative part of any virtualization deployment strategy. VMware vSphere 4 and the vStorage API for Data Protection introduced several enhancements including changed block tracking (CBT) and virtual proxy servers. This paper details the challenges of protecting VMware vSphere environments, but more importantly examines the potential for backup improvements when compared to physical environments.