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Chapter 13. Working with a virtual
environment
Virtual machine technologies provide a powerful tool to help accelerate the development,
testing, deployment and support of PC applications.
As with physical machines, virtual machine (VM) data needs to be backed up periodically
to prevent its loss due to hardware failure or human errors. Since more and more
organizations choose running their business processes in a virtual environment, they need
a solution to perform the data backup and restore on virtual machines. This chapter
covers how Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server can be used in virtual and
heterogeneous environments.
13.1 Backing up data on virtual machines
A
virtual machine
is an emulated computer running within a host operating system. The
software that emulates the computer is called the
virtualization software
. The most
popular types of virtualization software are VMware Server and VMware Workstation,
Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Virtual PC, Citrix XenServer
and Parallels
Workstation.
Generally, a virtual machine can be treated:
1. As a physical computer (when it is online). Most Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise
Server features and settings are applicable to a VM. The backup procedure is almost the
same (see details in
Chapter 6. Creating backup archives
).
2. As a set of files that change in line with the VM state. The files represent the VM
configuration, storage, memory or other parameters. The files can be backed up with
both imaging and file-level backup.
However, backing up the running VM files can prevent us from restoring the virtual
system to a consistent point-in-time state. The issue is somewhat like backing up a
database. (The classic example is the Active Directory database, which seldom can be
recovered to a usable state.) Therefore, integration with dedicated tools available from
VM vendors is advisable.
Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server supports VMware Consolidated backup
available in VMware Infrastructure 3. This application takes snapshots of virtual machines
and uploads them to the proxy server. This enables LAN-free VM backup from the server
rather than directly from ESX server.
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 has the Virtual Server Volume Shadow Copy Service
(VSS) writer (VS Writer), which takes the VM snapshot by the backup software request.
Support for the VS writer may be considered in future Acronis True Image Enterprise
versions.
If you plan to back up the virtual machine files, stop or suspend the virtual machine.
Since the virtual disk file changes from session to session and therefore will be always
included in the backup, incremental or differential backups are not appropriate in this
case. An incremental backup size will be almost equal to a full backup size.
13.2 Recovering data on virtual machines
A virtual disk can be restored from its image (.tib file), previously created with Acronis
True Image Echo Enterprise Server just as physical disk can be recovered.
