Vembu Best Practices Guide

VMware Backup Components

• Vembu BDR Backup Server
• vCenter Server & ESXi Server
• Backup Proxy
• Storage Repository

The components that are mentioned above are necessary to perform backup, and restore processes with the VMware Virtual Machines. From the Vembu BDR backup server, you can directly integrate to the vCenter Server or to the ESXi host.

You can configure backups directly from your Vembu BDR backup server or from VMBackup client.

We recommend that your Vembu BDR backup server is configured with a vCenter Server.

Guidelines for vCenter Level integration

• Check the connectivity between the vCenter Server and Vembu BDR backup server as Vembu BDR backup server communicates with the vCenter Server for many operations. Good connectivity can ensure faster backups.

We recommend you to use the vCenter Server Standard Edition type. It should be fast, reliable, and can handle workload. Read more in our Blog

The reason why we recommend you to configure a vCenter Server which can handle workload is that when jobs run simultaneously, load (write) will be high. In such cases, the vCenter Server must be able to handle these situations.

Note that Vembu cannot power on a virtual machine with a virtual hardware version that is higher than what it supports. Vembu can power on a virtual machine with a virtual hardware version that is lower than what it supports, but some functionality may be lost.

Snapshot

We recommend that your VMware Tools are updated.

Virtual Machines are composed of certain specific files, Snapshot is a part of these files. These files are dependent on the VM Disks, that is the reason they are referred to as Snapshot Chain. During the backup process, Vembu BDR backup server sends a request to the vSphere to quiesce the files and return a snapshot. The snapshot will be taken, and once the backup is completed the snapshot will be removed.

We do not recommend you to configure simultaneous backup which takes snapshots of the same VMs.

Some Guidelines for VMware Snapshot as specified by VMware

• Do not treat snapshots as backups. We have explained it in our Blog Here
• Allocate space for VM Snapshots

Delete the snapshot once the backup is completed. (Automatic deletion will be done in most cases). In some cases, you might need to create a snapshot manually. Refer to this KB article - KB105010

• When the snapshot process is initiated Vembu BDR backup server performs the stun-un-stun process. To create a snapshot, the VM must be stunned for a second, wherein the snapshot of the disk and files will be taken.
• Refer to this VMware article on the best practices for VMware Snapshot - Link

The components explained in the section above is applicable for VMware Replication also.