Backing up and Recovering Virtual Machines
4959_Ch07_CMP3 4/20/05 5:30 PM Page 223 CHAPTER 7 ■ ■ ■ Backing Up and Recovering Virtual Machines For virtual machines running in a production environment, backup and recovery is just as serious as for all the other servers on the network. When running servers inside VMs, you’ll be faced with several new challenges, as well as advantages, when planning and implementing a backup strategy. In this chapter, you’ll explore the process of planning for and administering backup and recovery operations on VMs and VM hosts. Along the way, you’ll see the different approaches you can take to secure VM data, which include the following: •Traditional agent-based backups •Non-agent-based backups •Flat-file backups Also, many organizations have embraced the idea of maintaining a warm standby VM server that can be brought online if a primary server fails. This approach, for many organiza- tions, may mean that data is unavailable for a few minutes following the loss of a server. If you can’t afford to cluster all your systems, or if some of your applications don’t support clustering, then you may find this approach to be a perfect fit. Since the focus of this chapter is purely on VM backup and recovery, we’ll walk you through the process of maintaining a standby VM server in Chapter 14. Optimizing your backup strategy often means much more than simply installing software and letting it do its magic. Oftentimes, custom scripting is required to get the backup results you desire. Because of the importance of getting your virtual infrastructure to work around your needs (instead of the other way around), we’ll also show you several scripting ideas to both enhance and automate the backup, recovery, and availability of your VMs.
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