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Challenges of Backing Up and Restoring Virtual ComputersComplete Transcript of Acronis Interview Stephen Lawton and Jason Raymond Host — Alan Ashendorf on Let's Talk Computers April 14 2007 Alan: Most of the time when we're talking about backing and restoring our computer systems, we're talking about backing a physical machine and restoring it to a physical machine. But, what about this new world of "virtualization"? Our guest, today are Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing with Acronis and Jason Raymond, Senior Solutions Engineer with Acronis. And welcome to Let's Talk Computers, Guys! Jason: It's great to be here. Stephen: Its always a pleasure to come back. Alan: When we're talking about backing up just a regular computer system and restoring it to a regular computer system, we have a physical box for our "source" and a physical box for our "target". But, when we're talking about virtualization, all bets are off, aren't they? Stephen: They really are. Quite often, you'll have multiple servers, running multiple virtual servers, running on a single physical server. That's called "virtualizing" the hardware. In that case, you might have 4, 6, or 8 machines running on one physical box, (or more).
Alan: We talking about different types of virtual products — anywhere from Microsoft to VMware — don't all these different products have their own backup solution, built in and why shouldn't I use them? Stephen: Some of them do actually a rudimentary "backup migration tool" to take you from physical to virtual. Of course they want you to run in their virtual environment. The difference is that let's say that you move a database over and as the company grows, your database becomes larger. It takes more CPU cycles and all of a sudden you're finding that your systems are running slower and you want to move your database back out to a physical machine.
Software vendors, who have built operating systems, don't offer tools to go from the virtual to the physical world — only physical to the virtual. What you're looking for is something that can move from physical to virtual, virtual to physical, virtual to virtual and for that matter, physical to physical — truly going full circle. As a matter of fact, Acronis does offer a product called, Acronis Full Circle that is specifically for the migration of virtual machines. This is a Product that is built on the Acronis True Image technology but is designed specifically for migration, not for backup. Alan: I kind of look at it this way. Any mechanic or any shop will work on a car to make a car run. But, when you're talking about working on the brakes, because they are so critical in stopping your car when it needs to be stopped — you need a brake specialist.
I look at it the same way, when you're talking about backing up and restoring. Operating systems are fine. They come with their software. You've got all different types of programs and you've got freeware out there, but you really want to look to the specialists, when you're talking about critical backups and even more so, critical restores, because your business can go out of business if you don't have a good restore, isn't that right? Stephen: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a company that suffers an extreme outage and that doesn't have their data flow for more than just a few days, I believe the percentage is something like 40% of those companies will be out of business within five years. Now, those are odds that I don't want to take if I'm in business.
Alan: No, I don't want to be the Admin of a business where I go to the boss and say, "you know that backup that we've been doing every single day, I can't restore it. I could restore it, but I can't restore it to my new hardware. We didn't plan for this." This is something that you plan in from the get-go, because it does happen that way in the real world, doesn't it? Stephen: It not only does happen — it will happen. You know, we've discussed before that it's not a question of will hardware fail, it's a question of when will the hardware fail. And your data is going to long out-live your hardware. You really do need to be prepared for all types of circumstances. It just doesn't make sense today, with so many tools available to protect your data, to be running an IT shop, where you can't transport your data from one machine to another and be back up and running in minutes, as opposed to hours or days.
It's critical to be able to access your data; it's critical to be able to access your servers. You need to be able to do it all the time, without question, without worrying. Do I have the right components here; do I have the right configuration? That can't even be one of the questions. Alan: How do we back up to make sure that we have actual copies? How do we start backing up our virtual? Stephen: Essentially, backing up our virtual server is pretty much the same as backing up the physical server. So, you would use Acronis True Image Server or Acronis True Image Enterprise Server, depending on which one you have installed. You would take an image of that virtual server and you would save it remotely, on the network or to some other external drive. That pretty much stays the same.
The issue comes up when you want to back up the physical server that's running all of these virtual servers.
Alan: This is where it kind of gets interested, because when you look at the fact that you may have a physical box that we're calling it a "server" that is running multiple copies of servers, whether it's Exchange Server, or SQL servers, and all of these are servers, running on top of servers and we can't lose our backups. How do we backup virtual servers that are running on a single physical server? That gets to be interesting, doesn't it? Jason: It does get to be interesting there. Essentially, we treat them the same way. We treat the physical piece of hardware, "x86", like a piece of virtual hardware, "x86". We don't really care what's on a disk, whether it's emulations of machines or whether it's SQL. All we care about is that there is a disk with sectors. We're going to grab that disk and create an image file.
With that image file, Acronis offers a suite that will allow you to take an image and bring it anywhere — so, "image to anywhere". You can bring that physical box with all the virtual boxes onto a new piece of physical hardware; you can bring physical boxes into that virtual world — and then back, out.
Alan: You can't really take everything down, while you're backing everything, up — because that's the whole part of the business, is to keep all these virtual servers up and running — at the same time!
Jason: Acronis does every bit of imaging that we do in the True Image line, in "hot imaging". It's all live images. We have a special process. We go down and touch the kernel, that we call, "Snap API", which will actually create a buffer in the disk. So, any live transaction, any I/O that's going at that disk at any time is actually trapped in this buffer and obviously written to disk and then to our image file. So, every thing is live. Alan: But, when you start working with virtualization — let's take Exchange Server, for instance — you have mail that is going to in and out of this box all the time. How do you make sure that everything gets backed up when there is not any real point and time that you can take a snapshot, because everything is going to point A to point B, all the time? Jason: When we actually take our snapshot, the second I press Go on a backup job or the second it's scheduled to run — because of that buffer that we create when we are essentially freezing the operating system at a point and time. That snapshot, that graphical representation of what that disk looks like, is our frozen point in time. That's our map. That's what we're creating an image based on.
Some sectors might be unused; we're going skip those. Some might actually have a transaction going on. Let's say somebody is emailing your exchange server. That is actually flagged in a different way. Open transaction is flagged and during the process, once it's written to the actual disk, we write to the buffer and then into your image file. Alan: Now, when you back up, say your virtual servers that are running on this physical box, let's say exchange server, now you want to restore these virtual servers to the same box. How do we do that? Jason: Acronis actually allows you to get to a recovery environment in different ways. The way we normally ship it, as a CD-based restore, based on a Linux kernel, you can use PE environments WinPE, BartPE, Network protocols, such as Pixie, Microsoft RIS, (remote installation), or you can use what we call the Acronis Secure Zone, which is actually a piece of a local disk that is actually bootable and emulates our recovery environment. So, you create a shell of a virtual machine, then you'll boot that virtual machine, let's say to a CD-based recovery environment, and typically, that CD-based recovery environment is a live operating system on a disk. You can actually point out to the network, point out to FTP protocols, point to a local network share — your NAS, your SAN — grab an image file and restore it to that blank virtual.
Alan: What about if the hardware is different — let's say that your physical box totally has crashed or is no longer available for whatever reason and now you need to restore you images to a brand, new physical device. How do we do that? Jason: To get the host operating system onto a new piece of hardware, if I'm going from a Dell 2950 to HP 380G5 — you're going to need a special product, (something we call Universal Restore). It's an add-on module and essentially what that will do is allow you to take this image and go anywhere with it, (image to anywhere). To restore the image, it doesn't really matter what drivers are needed to boot up that machine. But, we're going to restore that image then we're going to restart the machine; we're to mount the file system; and then we're going to essentially insert the drivers into the HAL and into the Hive. Alan: But, when you're talking about a virtual server or a virtual machine that's sitting on top of a physical device, you really don't have to worry about dissimilar hardware, do you? Jason: Not really. What you need to worry about is dissimilar platforms. Maybe, if you're using VMware ESX20.5 and you want to upgrade to 3.0 or you're using ZEN, maybe the new Longhorn release, (once it's out), Microsoft Virtual and a lot of other virtual players out there. There's not really a way to convert one virtual machine to another platform very easily. Universal Restore allows you to do that. Alan: So, I can actually take a dissimilar virtual machine, virtual platform, and actually restore something completely different. You were talking about taking Microsoft's Virtual Platform and actually restoring it and making it a VMware? Jason: We're treating it as a piece of hardware, so Microsoft Virtual to us is an IBM. It's just a piece of physical hardware. We take an image of that virtual machine and then we can essentially "ptov" it or in this case, it would be "vtov" it, (virtual to virtual).
Alan: You mentioned earlier that we can use the Acronis Secure Zone. How does that work, because so many times when we are backing up our software, especially backing up live, we do not want a virus to be able to get to our backups, at all. But, at the same time we want we want to be able to boot and restore our backups? Jason: The Acronis Secure Zone is simply a FAT partition that only Acronis can read. The FAT partition that we create; at minimum we take used space from a local disk. At minimum, it has to be about 34 Meg and that's just so that you can boot to that partition. You hit f11, you pop in a password and it emulates our recovery environment. You can also save images, directly to that password protected, encoded partition. So, you can save images there.
The second part of your question: What if I have a virus? What if my machine that I'm backing up, gets attacked by a virus at the time that I'm backing it up? Acronis has another great feature. It's called "mounting". We can actually mount our images by assigning them a logical drive letter. That's the fastest way to get at your data, actually.
You can assign it a logical drive letter; you can share this virtual disk on your network, just like it was a physical hardware and users can drag and drop anything they need. But, in your case, with this virus, we offer another mode. Not just "read mode", we offer, "read-write mode", so you could assign this disk the letter Z, bring up your anti-virus software, run it on drive Z, and once the virus is fixed, wrap it up; close it down; restore it and your machine is fixed.
Alan: And what are we look at as far as the cost of this? Stephen: A workstation, if you were doing this on a Vista or XP machine, you're looking at $79.99 for the workstation, plus an additional $29.99 list for the Universal Restore. If you were talking about a single, standalone server, the list price for Acronis True Image Server, is $699 and $299 for the Universal Restore module. On an Enterprise Server, the list price is $999, with an additional $299 for the Universal Restore. Alan: And if somebody would like to find more information about strategy for backing up and restoring our systems and working with new virtualization, where would they go? Stephen: They can visit us at www.acronis.com.
Alan: As always, it's been our pleasure to have you as our guest here on Let's Talk Computers and Jason, it's great to have you here, talking about virtualization and we are looking forward to having you both, back. Stephen: Thanks so much. Jason: Thank you very much.
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