Friday, July 27, 2012

Protecting vC Ops Data with VADP and SRM

If you use vC Ops to monitor and report on your environment, you are aware of how important the historical analysis and metrics collected are to getting value out of the product. 

Yesterday, VMware published three KB articles outlining ways to protect your vC Ops data.

KB 2031899 - Managing a VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.x deployment where the vApp is broken

KB 2031890 - vCenter Operations Manager 5.0.x: Using VMware Data Recovery to Back Up and Restore a vApp deployment

KB 2031891 - vCenter Operations Manager 5.0.x: Using Site Recovery Manager to Protect a vApp Deployment

 A couple of things to call out from these KBs...

- While VDR may not be a viable option for your environment, note that it's the VADP capabilities that allow you to perform an snapshot based backup of your vC Ops vApp that is critical.  So, if you are using an enterprise backup solution which supports VADP you're in good shape.  Ideally, your backup solution will include support for vApp aware backups - but even if not you can still take advantage of VADP-based backups to protect your vC Ops data.

- Embrace the broken vApp!  As you can see from KB 2031899, the vApp is not necessary for running vC Ops as long as you are aware that things like startup/shutdown sequence as well as IP address management are going to require a little more attention.  I've had some customers ask about moving or re-IP of vC Ops and this KB should help.  This is also key information if you are using a non-vApp aware backup solution and you have to restore the two VMs - you need not worry about recreating the vApp at that point.

- Speaking of vApps - while SRM isn't going to support protection of vC Ops as a vApp, you can still protect the two VMs individually as described in KB 2031891.

Hopefully this helps customers who are concerned about losing months of collected data and analysis!


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