TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter focuses on backup strategies and the different approaches available to ensure you can recover your Service Console and VMs after a disaster. VMware provides greater flexibility in backing up virtual servers compared with traditional backup methods; however, that flexibility comes at the cost of a greater degree of complexity. VMware offers two general approaches for backing up your server environments, each with its own benefits and limitations. It s important to thoroughly understand the application model of VMware in order to select the approach best suited to your environment. This model touches a wide variety of factors, including:
Host operating systems
Guest operating systems
SAN/NAS hosting
Network bandwidth
Resource utilization
Current backup equipment and capabilities
Backups are the cornerstone of any business/disaster recovery or business continuity plan without backups, you have nothing to recover. Having the ability to recovery quickly using a current and reliable backup enables a business to continue operating, if perhaps at a reduced level of service. So make certain that your operations strategy considers carefully the short-term and long-term manageability of your backup strategy.
The Service Console is a modified version of Linux that can run agents and backup software created for the Linux platform. To back up the Service Console, you have the option to install backup agents on the console and perform the backup over the network from a backup server, or you can install backup server...
