Well I have recovered from attending my first VMware Partner Exchange!   I thought it was great and the breakouts were full of valuable technical information.  I also attended a boot camp, which meant being in class from Saturday till Monday, not the funnest way to spend a weekend in Las Vegas, but definitely worthwhile.
I attended several break outs that focused on virtualizing business critical applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server.  One demo showed the use of a second or standby VM for patches and upgrades.  The demo can be seen here-
All of the presenters in the breakouts made plenty of time to answer questions during and after their presentations.  It was great to ask questions from one of the actual developers of an area or product.
The hands on labs were another great area to see and learn new technologies!
For anyone else who was able to attend PEX this year, let me know your thoughts. 

We have been evaluating backup systems for our virtual environment the past few months.  The requirements are to back up all virtual machines, over 1,000 and growing, have an option for DR replication, can quickly restore a virtual machine, and include the storage to house the backups.

I have used most of the popular backup products in various size environments, but this was the first time I got hands on use of EMC’s Avamar.

I don’t want to go into a bakeoff comparison of the other backup products, and one thing to note is that price was not a major requirement.  Avamar is not the least expensive, but you know the saying, you get what you pay for!

Avamar is a complete backup solution, including the backup server, data storage, all client backup licenses such as Exchange, Oracle, SQL and file level.  There is a single interface for administration either using a web browser, console client or command line interface.

Avamar is made up of two components, a utility node and a storage node.

Utility nodes are dedicated to providing internal Avamar server processes and services, including the administrator server, cron jobs, external authentication, Network Time Protocol (NTP) and web access.

Storage nodes include the Avamar Data Server software and are dedicated to store the actual backup data. Multi-node servers include a spare node that can be manually activated in the event of a node failure.

Avamar includes the following key features   (copied from the sales literature):

Global data deduplication ensures that data objects are only backed up once across the backup environment.

Systematic fault tolerance, using RAID, RAIN, checkpoints, and replication provides data integrity and disaster recovery protection

• Highly reliable, inexpensive disk storage for primary backup storage.
• Standard IP network technologies.  Optimizes use of network for backup; dedicated backup networks are not required.  Daily full backups are possible using existing networks and infrastructure.
• Scalable server architecture, provides security and expandability.  Additional storage nodes can be added to an Avamar multi-node server to accommodate increased backup storage requirements.
• Flexible deployment options include Avamar Virtual Edition and Avamar Data Store. Avamar supports a wide-variety of client operating systems and applications, including: Windows, Linux, Unix, NDMP, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Oracle.  With its global deduplication technology, --Avamar is an efficient backup choice for VMware and remote office backup environments.
• Centralized management. Avamar Enterprise Manager and Avamar Administrator interfaces enable remote management of Avamar servers from a centralized location.

The deduplication with Avamar is quite impressive.  The system we implemented has 32 TB of disk storage and it is backing up 75 TB of data!

You can also set up replication to another Avamar server.

Replication can be configured in multiple ways to meet your requirements.  For example, replication can be used to provide disaster recovery protection of data from multiple single-node servers to a central multi-node server in a remote, branch office to home office scenario. It can also provide peer-to-peer disaster recovery protection from a single-node to single-node server and multi-node to multi-node servers.

The two basic kinds of Avamar replication are standard (normal) and full copy (root-to-root):

Standard or normal replication copies backup data from one or more source Avamar servers to a destination Avamar server. With standard replication, an Avamar server can be both a replication source and a target for replication. And, multiple source Avamar servers can replicate to the same target Avamar server.

Full copy or root-to-root replication creates a complete logical copy of an entire source server on the destination Avamar server.

If you happen to have multiple sites and datacenters with good network connectivity, you can back up your servers, virtual or physical, to a single Avamar server.  Avamar utilizes proxies to run the backup jobs of your virtual machines.  The proxies can be deployed using an OVA file from your vCenter.

Avamar allows various options for restoring a virtual machine that includes:

• Restoring to a new virtual machine
• Restoring to the original virtual machine
• Restoring to a different virtual machine

You also have the options to select what host or cluster to restore to, and if you have multiple VMDK files, to select only the one you need.

So far I am very impressed with the Avamar solution, and in the tech support engineers I have worked with.

More details on Avamar and the restore options to come…