PHD Virtual Backup v7.0 for Hyper-V

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hello, and welcome to the sneak preview, of PHD Virtual Backup, for Hyper-V….. My name is Mark McHenry, and also with me today, is James West, PHD Virtual SE Manager, who will entertain your questions at the end of the presentation. Many of you with us today, have been asking about Hyper-V backup, so we wanted to give you a sneak peek, before we go GA with this, later this quarter. For those of you in our beta program, we appreciate your efforts, to help us ensure a quality version 7.0 release, as we endeavor to support our third major hypervisor, and a brand new architecture, which will be the foundation of our backup product, that will eventually include vSphere,… XenServer,… AND Hyper-V,… all managed from a single interface.
• #3: I’ll start off by sharing some quick highlights about PHD Virtual, for those of you, that might be just finding out about us. Then, we’ll discuss much of the new functionality that PHD Virtual Backup version 7.0 has to offer. We’ll also give you a glimpse into the new architecture – both for 7.0 and what’s to come in future releases that will also support vSphere and XenServer……… Next, we’ll touch on installation and configuration. After that we’ll take a look at future functionality that’s on the road map, and we’ll finish off the presentation, with a nice surprise for our customers and potential customers,… and then we’ll entertain questions. So please text any questions you might have in the GOTO Webinar window, in the chat section near the bottom, and we will address them at the end as time permits.Bear in mind, this is a sneak preview, and this v7 software has not yet gone GA. So what we are sharing here today, could change before the GA date, later this quarter, although there is a good chance that there might be no modifications to what you see today.
• #4: Lets get started by helping you understand a little more about our company…PHD Virtual provides the absolute best value in backup & disaster recovery assurance for virtual and cloud environments.We help customers dramatically reduce the costs and risk of recovery within SLAsMore than 6,500 customers worldwide rely on our products (our customers are a who’s who among the Fortune 500 and we serve 1000s of mid-market companies too)Thanks to the amazing reception we have had from customers we have had 14 consecutive quarters of record revenue growth – This makes us one of the fastest growing software companies around the globeAnd, as you can imagine, our company has been recognized as standing out from our peers by receiving numerous awards as well as a direct investment by Citrix
• #5: Now let’s move on to what you will get this with the v7.0 release.
• #6: The obvious enhancement is that 7.0 will support Microsoft Hyper-V, and we plan to stick to the latest functionality offered in Windows Server 2012 and beyond. This is largely due to the market traction of these hypervisor versions, as well as the improved APIs, that we can leverage for data protection, compared to what was offered in earlier Windows Server versions for Hyper-V.Our product, as always, performs Image-based backups. Therefore, we’ll use a virtual appliance to perform all major processing, rather than installing agents in each guest. This makes deployment and maintenance simple, in addition to following best practices for virtualization data protection. While each backup contains the complete image of the VM, its configuration and metadata,… and its virtual disk data recoveries,… can include the entire VM image, or granular files and folders, from that single backup.A great enhancement that Hyper-V provides over other hypervisors, is that virtual disks can be run on SMB shares. This means that SMB shares become optimized backup targets for our VBA, because you can attach the Backup Data Store, or BDS, as a virtual disk.Lastly, with the release of PHD Virtual Backup v7.0 for Hyper-V,… PHD will be the first to support all three major hypervisors, using agentless data protection methods. It is important to clarify that 7.0 supports Hyper-V only. Users of vSphere and XenServer, will leverage our latest v6.5 release, until we bring those hypervisors into the v7 architecture in 2014.
• #7: A fundamental goal of this release was to enable large scale management of many VBAs. Our current architecture is very easy to use for small to mid-sized environments, but we needed to make some key enhancements to ensure it was simple to manage for larger environments.The way VMs are protected is very different than in v6. In v7, instead of creating a job first, you use the protect page to select VMs - or containers of VMs such as a host – and then assign the options you wish to use for protection. For ease of use, we offer default options. You can then select “Backup” to kick off the job wizard. This pushes a number of the options that were currently job or VBA level options, to the VM for better granularity. One such example of a VBA option that users asked us to make more granular, was our retention settings. Those can now be configured on a per VM basis.The primary job options in v7 are backup mode, schedule, and notification requirements. When a job runs, we will select the VBA to use for each VM. Jobs do not interact with a single VBA anymore. They leverage all VBAs as needed to get the job done most effectively. The VBA selection process leverages a few simple rules:We look to see whether you chose to assign a VM to a particular BDS. Since there is a 1:1 VBA to BDS ratio, we quickly know which VBA will execute the job in that situation.If you did not assign a BDS, we will first look to find which VBAs have access to the VMs’ storage.We then check to see if a particular VBA has already backed up the VM. If it has, that VBA will take priority in order to maximize dedupe, and shrink the backup window.We then prioritize the VBA that has the least amount of source data committed to it, to ensure the load is balanced across the environment.Of course, more rules will be added in future releases, to optimize the backup process.Aside from making job management easier, VBAs can now support greater than 2 Terabyte partitions to take advantage of the fact that you can have very large VHDs in the latest Hyper-V release. This limits the number of VHDs needed to build greater than 2 Terabyte backup data stores. Please note that, for now, enabling this option will require a short call to our support team.Lastly, handling huge inventory sets is taxing on your backup infrastructure. V7 has major enhancements with inventory and backup catalog management, to improve performance for those huge environments, by leveraging new database and caching algorithms within the management and UI components of the VBA.
• #8: Many of the new features discussed are solely enabled by the new v7 VBA architecture. We’d like to provide you with a quick overview of that architecture.
• #9: The new v7 architecture leverages a web-based interface. The UI is now managed by a new role within the VBA, called the presentation role. The second role that a VBA can have, is the management role. This component of the VBA handles inventory, and protection management, within a particular virtual environment. In the context of Hyper-V, an environment is either a single host, or a collection of hosts, that you designate PHD to manage, as a single environment.The last role a VBA can be assigned is the engine. This is the code that processes backup and recovery tasks.A simple, single VBA environment will automatically take on all three roles. However, for multi-VBA environments, you may have multiple engines, to scale-out for larger datasets. Additionally, if you are managing multiple environments from a single interface, you will need multiple managers. However, there can only be a single presentation role if you wish to leverage a centralized interface across environments. Being able to consolidate or spread out these roles across VBAs, allows for easy deployment in smaller environments, and high performing management in very large environments.[Click twice]Hyper-V requires additional components for agentless data protection. The PHD Hyper-V services are installed on each Hyper-V host andcoordinates Hyper-V specific business logic ,and provides communication between VBAs, Hyper-V nodes, and other PHD Hyper-V Services on remote nodes. This component uses the RabbitMQ messaging service to communicate with PHD VBAs and other PHD Hyper-V Services installations. In the current 7.0 release, the service is installed manually using a simple installer program. Future releases will push the installation to the host.
• #10: Taking a glimpse into the future 7.x releases, you can see how this new architecture allows PHD to manage across multiple environments and across hypervisors, all from a centralized web-based interface. Each Hypervisor environment will leverage one to many processing engines. Each environment needs at least one manager role deployed in order to handle inventory and job management for that environment. Then a single presentation role is assigned to be the centralized interface. Scalability is easily handled for large inventory sets,… and reporting across environments is greatly simplified with this new architecture. [Click once]Notice that the requirement to install software on a host is only applicable to Hyper-V. There will be no such requirement for vSphere or XenServer, when we add those hypervisors into the new architecture, over the next couple of releases.
• #11: As noted earlier, there is a detailed installation guide that provides step by step instructions for deploying and configuring VBAs and the PHD Hyper-V services. It is highly recommended that you follow this documentation to avoid missing any key steps in the process.For the first phase of Beta, support may initiate a web meeting to assist with the installation.
• #12: The pre-install checklist is pretty straightforward. Naturally, you’ll need to know how you’d like the VBA to network in the environment. The key to remember here is that either Chrome or Firefox is needed to use our web interface. We don’t support Internet Explorer in version 7.0. And, of course, the web browser must be run,… from a machine that can route to the VBA.
• #13: The two components that need to be installed for 7.0, are the PHD Hyper-V Services, and the VBA. The Hyper-V services, are manually installed on each Hyper-V host that runs VMs you wish to protect. For authentication purposes, you’ll need to add PHD user credentials, that will be used for communications between PHD Hyper-V Services, and the VBA with the management role. This process is quite simple, and is handled by a small installation program, provided in the PHD software download.Next, you’ill use the PHD Hyper-V Administration Tool to deploy the VBAs. If you currently manage a vSphere or XenServer environment, and are familiar with PHD Virtual Backup,… you’ll notice that Hyper-V is quite different in its deployment of VMs. Please ensure you check the installation guide for step by step instructions to deploy VBAs. The v7 architecture provides two virtual disks with the VBA. The first disk is the OS disk. The second disk houses important configuration data for the VBA. You will add a third disk for the backup target, after the VBA is deployed. The reason we added the second disk to the VBA, is so that a VBA and its OS disk could be discarded, and a new VBA can connect to the data disk, to preserve all necessary configuration information. If you’d like to change the virtual CPU or memory settings, you can easily do that, after the VBA is imported into the environment.
• #14: Here is a quick example of a deployment with multiple hosts. You can see that the PHD Service, is installed on each Hyper-V host. PHD built a capability to allow you to designate a single host, as the master host, of a multi-host environment that uses shared storage. This allows you to configure a single VBA to protect VMs running on either host, depicted here on Hyper-V Server 1. The major benefit here, is that PHD Virtual Backup, does not need to be cluster-aware, in order to manage configurations using Cluster Shared Volumes, and shared storage. VMs can move freely between hosts, and PHD will be able to continue to protect those VMs as needed. And it is important to note that all deduplication will be maintained, as VMs move from host to host.
• #15: We wanted to end the presentation with some additional insight into our product roadmap, and a surprise related to our go to market strategy for Hyper-V. For those of you in our Beta program, we will be happy to schedule a call with you and the PHD product management team to discuss the roadmap in much more detail. Additionally, we advise everyone to visit our website periodically to keep informed.
• #16: There are a few key features to be added in 2014 in versions 7.1 and 7.2. We plan to add support for vSphere in 7.1,… and XenServer in 7.2,… so that users can manage multiple hypervisor environments – large and small – through a centralized interface.By 7.1, we expect Hyper-V to have VSS and changed-block tracking included. Changed tracking is especially important, for improving the read times of the backup process. If you’ve used vSphere, you know the impact. Because Hyper-V doesn’t offer a VM-based changed tracking API,… this functionality will be developed by PHD.Across the two releases, we’ll also be adding advanced features such as Instant VM Recovery (which involves running a VM directly from backup storage), Backup Archiving (which is an automated offsite copy of your backups), CertifiedReplica and CertifiedBackup (which are very advanced, automated, application, verification and SLA management features, provided by PHD Virtual Backup’s integration with our ReliableDR product). VM replication will also be included, and much more.
• #17: As we progress into GA this year, there’s one key reason that using version 7.0 for Hyper-V will be a no brainer…And that is…it’s free… We’ll be making a splash with advanced data protection and management, for no license cost. You can optionally purchase support, to ensure you can update to new versions, and get help from our highly trained staff. If you choose not to purchase a support contract, you can use 7.0 for as long as your environment will support the release.
• #19: And now let’s get to your questions… As you are typing them into the text box in the gotowebinar pane, please note our contact information, if you should need to touch base with us directly,…And please make sure you enter our guaranteed recovery for life drawing. All you have to do is go to our website and fill out a form to download any one of our product trials, and you will be automatically entered into a drawing to win our Recovery Management Suite, free for life. This is a huge value that includes backup, cloud backup, Exchange and SharePoint recovery, and DR testing software. With that said , let’s go to the first question.