How NetBackup Backups the VMware Virtual Machine

The growth of MWware virtual machine is getting more and more masive. Not only as a complement but now has replaced the physical server that takes up space, cost, power supply, and other large resouce.  The need for data protection from vmware has been anticipated by veritas by issuing a product that is capable of securing existing data in the vmware virtual machine called as NetBackup for VMware.

NetBackup for VMware provides backup and restore of the VMware virtual machines that run on VMware ESX servers. NetBackup for VMware takes advantage of VMware vStorage APIs for data protection. The backup process is off-loaded from the ESX server to a VMware backup host. 

Generally, Netbackup performs a backup process on vmware consists of 4 steps, namely:

• Phase 1 : The NetBackup master server initiates the backup.
• Phase 2 : The NetBackup client on the VMware backup host initiates a VMware snapshot on the virtual machine.
• Phase 3 : Windows: VSS synchronizes the file system on the virtual machine. Linux: The SYMCquiesce utility can quiesce the file system on supported Linux operating systems.
• Phase 4 : The VMware server creates a snapshot on the virtual disk datastore. The NetBackup client reads the snapshot from the datastores and writes the data to the NetBackup storage unit.

NetBackup for VMware requires an Enterprise Client license for each ESX Server. To protect an application or database, note: an additional license for the appropriate NetBackup package is needed for each ESX server that hosts the application or database.

Source: Netbackup80adminguide