ESG Lab Validation Report: Achieving Best Practices for Virtual Machine Backup & Recovery with Symantec Backup Exec 2014

Lab Validation Report Symantec Backup Exec 2014

Achieving Best Practices for Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery

By Vinny Choinski, Senior Lab Analyst, and Kerry Dolan, Lab Analyst

May 2014 © 2014 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: Symantec Backup Exec 2014 2

© 2014 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 3 Background .............................................................................................................................................................. 3 Best Practices in Virtualization Protection .............................................................................................................. 4 Backup Exec 2014 .................................................................................................................................................... 4

ESG Lab Test Bed ......................................................................................................................................... 6

ESG Lab Validation ...................................................................................................................................... 7 Monitoring and Management ................................................................................................................................. 7 Multi-‐hypervisor ...................................................................................................................................................... 9 Deduplication ........................................................................................................................................................ 11 Fast, Flexible Restore ............................................................................................................................................. 12 Post-‐process Application Handling ........................................................................................................................ 15

ESG Lab Validation Highlights .................................................................................................................... 17

Issues to Consider ..................................................................................................................................... 17

The Bigger Truth ........................................................................................................................................ 18

Appendix ................................................................................................................................................... 19

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-‐copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

ESG Lab Reports

The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's expert third-‐party perspective is based on our own hands-‐on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by Symantec.



Introduction This ESG Lab Validation report documents hands-‐on testing of Symantec Backup Exec 2014. Testing focused on advanced virtual server data protection and how Backup Exec 2014 measures up against best practices in virtual data protection.

Background

Server virtualization has taken IT by storm: In recent ESG research, more than three-‐quarters (77%) of respondents reported that they were currently using server virtualization.1 It has become a mainstream technology because of its tremendous benefits: primarily, the reduced equipment and management costs of consolidating multiple applications onto fewer physical servers. In addition, while increasing the use of server virtualization has been among the top three most-‐cited important priorities by respondents to our annual spending intentions surveys for several years, it rose to the top in the 2014 survey—tied for most-‐cited with critically important information security initiatives, and just ahead of another perennial favorite, improving data backup and recovery. 2 These two tend to go hand in hand because virtualization complicates the backup landscape.

As a result, IT organizations often struggle to find the best methods for protecting virtual and physical machines. Many believe (mistakenly) that they must use hypervisor-‐specific or virtualization-‐only solutions for virtual server backup. As Figure 1 shows, more than half (53%) of respondents to an ESG survey reported that they use different backup applications for their virtual and physical servers. However, a multi-‐pronged approach leads to inefficiency, adding management overhead and complicating recovery. This is borne out by the fact than more than two-‐thirds (69%) of respondents indicated that they would prefer to use a single backup application to protect both virtual and physical servers.3

Figure 1. Data Protection for Virtual and Physical Servers, Current versus Preferred Approach

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2014.

1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2013. 2 Source: ESG Research Report, 2014 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2014. 3 Source: ESG Research Report, Trends in Data Protection Modernization, August 2012.

53% 47%

0%

24%

69%

7%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Use separate backup applicadons for virtual and physical server

environments

Use a single backup applicadon for virtual and physical server

environments

Don't know

What is your organizaBon’s current approach to protecBng its virtual and physical servers? What do you believe would be your organizaBon’s preference for protecBng its

virtual and physical servers? (Percent of respondents, N=201) Current approach Preferred approach



Unfortunately, many organizations continue to manage two or more data protection solutions, accompanied by greater complexity and increased TCO.4

Best Practices in Virtualization Protection

When assessing virtualization backup solutions, it can be helpful to leverage the experience of experts in the field. ESG Senior Analyst Jason Buffington recently developed a set of high-‐level best practices for virtualization protection:5

• Management and Monitoring. Virtual backup solutions should be easy to deploy and manage, with automation across the stack. The ease of spinning up VMs—often without IT involvement—necessitates not just automated discovery for protection, but the ability to tailor workflows by VM as well. Integration with hypervisor consoles is essential.

• Multi-‐hypervisor. More organizations are deploying multiple hypervisors for manageability and economic reasons, particularly as features gaps between hypervisors have closed so that they enjoy a level of parity. Backup solutions must support this new reality.

• Deduplication. The ease and speed of launching VMs creates “VM sprawl” that consumes disk storage at alarming rates due to massive amounts of duplicate data, applications, and operating systems. As a result, built-‐in deduplication is essential. Source-‐side deduplication (aided by change-‐block tracking, file system filtering, NTFS journals, etc.) will reduce I/O, network, and storage requirements. Global deduplication across multiple hosts will further reduce storage needs.

• Fast, Flexible Restore. Speed of restore dictates how fast you can return to production operations. Virtual backup solutions should include fast restore, granularity to meet user needs (such as restoring whole VMs or application-‐based items such as individual files, databases, mailboxes, and e-‐mails), and flexible restore/conversion options such as physical-‐to-‐virtual (P2V), virtual-‐to-‐physical (V2P), and backup-‐to-‐virtual (B2V).

• Application-‐aware Handling. While some solutions deliver crash-‐consistent backups, they do not enable or handle log truncation and other post-‐backup processing and cleanup. Virtual backup solutions should facilitate post-‐process application handling, whether through injectable modules such as agents or recursive mechanisms, such as Microsoft Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

These best practices help to create an environment that offers simple, unified data protection across the physical and virtual landscape, maximum protection and data availability, and reduced storage needs and operational costs. ESG Lab evaluated Backup Exec 2014 in the context of these best practices and found that it met all the requirements easily. The Validation section of this report is organized according to these practices.

Backup Exec 2014

Backup Exec 2014 continues Symantec’s long tradition of advanced data protection by providing a powerful, flexible backup and recovery solution for both virtual and physical environments that supports VMware and Hyper-‐V as well as Windows, Linux, and Macintosh environments. It includes full support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2, plus granular recovery for Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013. This latest version also includes faster performance as well as dashboards and wizards that enable ease of deployment and operations. Another benefit is the flexibility of both backup and restore. Versatile and fast recovery options include granular restore of individual objects, applications, or VMs, as well as the ability to restore to different hardware and to physical servers or VMs.

4 For additional information, see the white paper, Assessing the TCO of Unified vs. Parallel Backup Solutions for Virtual Environments on the Symantec website. 5 For more information, view the ESG video blog, What IT Pros should look for in Virtualization Protection, August 2012.



Powerful

Backup Exec 2014 offers faster backups, flexible backup methods, and the ability to verify recoverability. These are key to managing the growing number of VMs and data volumes that need protection while minimizing downtime and disruption; completing backups within the backup window; and achieving recovery time objectives (RTOs). A multi-‐hypervisor protection solution, Backup Exec 2014 is integrated with VMware vCenter as well as VMware APIs for Data Protection (VADP) and Microsoft VSS. Integrated deduplication reduces data volumes to minimize storage capacity. Backup Exec 2014 leverages VMware’s change block tracking feature (CBT), Windows Change Journal, and its own CBT for fast incremental/differential backups and efficient deduplication at the client, media server, or appliance. Global deduplication helps to ensure maximum savings by eliminating duplication across all protected volumes, not just by server.

Flexible

Backup Exec 2014 offers multiple backup and restore options, including restore from any full or incremental point in time to maximize flexibility. Agentless backup provides recovery of complete VMs while optional agents (for coordination only, not data movement) enable granular recovery of virtualized applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, Active Directory, and SQL Server.

Backup Exec 2014 was designed to support virtual, physical, or hybrid environments from a single management console. This enables organizations to reduce the cost and complexity of managing data protection by eliminating point solutions. It scales easily as a company grows, and backups can be directed to disk, to tape, or to cloud media. In terms of recovery, BE 2014 offers fast restore of files, folders, and individual application objects such as e-‐mails or documents. This enables IT to quickly recover only the data needed without having to restore entire volumes. Complete servers, VMs, or applications can be restored to the same or to dissimilar hardware, so organizations can leverage any available assets. Finally, the BE2014 workflow makes it simple to convert a running physical machine to a VM during the backup process (P2V), restore a VM to a physical host (V2P), and restore a backup directly to a VM (B2V). These features are useful for disaster recovery and for migrating a host to a different type of environment.

Easy to Use

BE2014 includes all the functionality that customers have counted on for many years, with simplified, centralized views across the physical and virtual environment. The management interface is simple and fast using dashboards and wizards. The interface includes the Job Monitor and server-‐centric management; a single backup job can be used to backup and manage multiple servers. In addition, with the new Backup Job feature IT can view the status of all backup jobs from one view. The “Stages” method uses intuitive wizards with which IT can set up backup jobs with just a few mouse clicks. Because VMs are easy to create (even without IT support), they can be left stranded and unprotected; BE 2014 automatically identifies new VMs to protect, ensuring that all data is safe.

Symantec offers cost-‐effective licensing options, and upgrades from prior versions of Backup Exec are seamless. Backup Exec 2014 can be deployed as software or as an appliance. The Symantec Backup Exec 3600 Appliance offers an affordable solution for easy deployment, and will include Backup Exec 2014 and all agents preinstalled on optimized hardware later in the year.



ESG Lab Test Bed The ESG Lab test bed was designed to demonstrate Backup Exec 2014 features for protecting virtual servers, and leveraged both VMware vSphere 5.0 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-‐V. As shown in Figure 2, the environment included a physical media server, both vSphere and Hyper-‐V hosts, and a physical Windows 2008 R2 file server. An additional server ran the Backup Exec 2014 software and the administrative consoles for Backup Exec 2014 and VMware vSphere over the LAN. (SAN-‐based backup is recommended for production environments, but for this testing the LAN was used. Supported methods and prioritization are shown in Figure 6.) The backup data included VMware and Hyper-‐V virtual machines for file serving, Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory, plus a physical file server.

Figure 2. ESG Lab Test Bed



ESG Lab Validation ESG Lab performed hands-‐on evaluation and testing of Backup Exec 2012 at the Symantec facility in Heathrow, Florida, with an update for Backup Exec 2014. Testing was designed to demonstrate how backup Exec 2014 achieves best practices in virtual data protection.

Monitoring and Management

ESG Lab began by taking a tour of the new Backup Exec 2014 management interface. A customizable home dashboard screen displayed storage used and available, backup status, and weekly protection tasks as well as active alerts, licensing, and maintenance contracts. With servers and storage already configured, the Lab then added servers and initiated backup jobs.

ESG Lab Testing

The Backup and Restore tab is shown in Figure 3, with servers listed on the left: three VMware ESX hosts and a physical Windows server. For each server, columns display active alerts, current status, a segmented bar showing status of the last seven days of backups (with successful jobs in green), and dates/times of the last and next backups. Activity-‐based buttons are shown at the top for executing tasks in various categories: Views, Backups, Restores, Conversions, Servers and Virtual Hosts, Jobs, and Credentials. Jobs can be managed individually, or using the Groups navigation bar on the left, which allows administrators to define a backup job and apply it to a group of servers. Behind the scenes, Backup Exec 2014 creates individual jobs so that each job can be individually configured if necessary. Individual job status can be viewed using the Job Monitor.

Figure 3. Backup and Restore Tab: Server-‐centric view

The bottom half of Figure 3 (with the yellow background) shows details of one VMware ESX host identified by its network address, 10.67.84.226. On the left is a high-‐level overview, indicating that this ESX server is hosting 17 guest VMs, of which one has been backed up. To the right are details for each guest VM, including the same details in the top half of the screen: current backup status, the last week’s backup status, and dates and times of the last



and next backups. ESG Lab drilled down on the VM that had been backed up and viewed a clickable, pop-‐up list showing the one successful backup job.

Next, ESG Lab reviewed Backup Exec 2014’s enhanced visibility into VM protection workflows. Backup Exec 2014 uses a series of staging screens with arrows illustrating process steps in order. Figure 4 shows an example using of a backup job being scheduled for host HROBEWS21. The box on the left shows that the host is fully selected, so that all file shares, network shares, applications, and system-‐specific settings are included for backup. The middle box is used to schedule the initial backup tasks (in this case, a weekly full backup and daily incrementals) and to assign storage targets and retention times. The box on the right describes the final task in the workflow: a weekly duplication of the most recent full backup to any configured tape target with the tape retention period listed. Additional stages can be added to each task if necessary.

Figure 4. Workflow Staging

Why This Matters Due to the scalability and mobility of virtual machines, ease of deployment and management with automation across the stack are best practices for virtual data protection.

ESG Lab validated that Backup Exec 2014 easily managed data protection for both VMware and Hyper VMs from a single management screen, with staging screens for better workflow visualization. VMs can be automatically discovered and added to the workflow in groups for ease of management, and each backup job can be tailored individually as needed. The changes in the administrative interface proved to simplify and speed VM backup task management, and also made it much easier to view high-‐level summaries, job status details, and process flows for protected VMs without custom scripts and add-‐on tools.



Multi-‐hypervisor

Next, ESG Lab explored the multi-‐hypervisor feature of Backup Exec 2014 by selecting VMs to back up. After clicking the Add button, Backup Exec 2014 displayed the options relevant to the environment, starting with the options to add Windows, VMware vCenter hosts, Hyper-‐V hosts, file servers, and SharePoint servers. The red box in Figure 5 shows three VMware servers and one physical Windows server that were added.

Figure 5. Adding Servers

Once servers were added, the Lab selected a 60GB Exchange VM from the vCenter host by right-‐clicking, applied the agent to enable granular restore, and clicked Go Now to initiate a backup.

Next, ESG Lab explored integration with virtual machine backup APIs. As shown in Figure 6, Backup Exec 2014 supports numerous configuration options to back up both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-‐V virtual machines, such as using full backups for VMs that don’t support incrementals, and backing up VMs that are powered off. Backups for VMs can be configured for image-‐level restores as well as granular file folder and object-‐level restores.

For simple file and system restores, ESG Lab configured both Microsoft Hyper-‐V and VMware virtual machine file servers. Backups were run for those VMs and both file-‐level and full-‐system restores were successfully conducted.



Figure 6. Virtual Machine Backup Options

At the application-‐object level for virtual machines, Backup Exec supports Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL. The Lab conducted both Microsoft Exchange and MSSQL backups and restores in subsequent sections of this report.

It should be noted that a number of transport modes and virtual environment API features such as Change Block Tracking are also supported. Figure 6 also shows the ability of Backup Exec to leverage SAN-‐based data movement for virtual data disks, the SCSI Hotadd feature, and a number of encryption options.

Why This Matters Multi-‐hypervisor support has become a prerequisite in virtual backup solutions because time and competition have created more parity in functionality among hypervisors. According to an ESG research survey, nearly two-‐thirds (65%) of respondents from midmarket and enterprise organizations reported using more than one hypervisor.6 Organizations often run multiple hypervisors to support certain workloads, minimize costs, and maximize the TCO of legacy products.

ESG Lab validated that Backup Exec 2014 successfully backed up and recovered VMware and Hyper-‐V virtual machines, with image-‐level and granular restores as well as integration with APIs for added features.

6 Source: ESG Research Brief, Multiple Hypervisor Usage Trends, December 2012.



Deduplication

Next, ESG Lab explored Backup Exec 2014’s built-‐in deduplication. The Lab reviewed the backup target storage utilization for a job that consisted of one full and eight incremental backups. Figure 7 shows how the Backup Exec deduplication feature maintained an almost consistent capacity on the backup target while the data being protected increased between backup jobs due to normal user interaction.

Figure 7. Backup Exec Data Deduplication versus Protected Production Data

Table 1 shows the results of the ESG Lab deduplication testing.

Table 1. Data Deduplication Detail

First Full Incr. #1 Incr. #2 Incr. #3 Incr. #4 Incr. #5 Incr. #6 Incr. #7 Incr. #8

1.53:1 1.63:1 1.72:1 1.82:1 1.92:1 2.01:1 2.1:1 2.2:1 2.29:1

What the Numbers Mean

• Backup Exec deduplication maintained an almost consistent backup target capacity as user data increased. • The deduplication ratio increased from 1.53:1 to almost 2.3:1 over the short testing period. • The testing period was only two days in duration. • The incremental backup data added between jobs was more random than real-‐world data. • Only one full backup of the data set was conducted during the test period. • ESG Lab would expect the deduplication rate to increase significantly with a longer cycle and real-‐world

data.



Why This Matters Best practices indicate the need for source-‐side deduplication, which alleviates much of the burden on the backup solution, plus global deduplication across hosts on the target side. Significant amounts of redundant data are generated in virtual environments, which will drive up costs without data reduction techniques.

ESG Lab validated that built-‐in deduplication with Backup Exec 2014 resulted in significant reduction of data stored while data being protected increased. As noted earlier, not only does Backup Exec 2014 leverage VMware CBT, but it also includes Symantec’s own CBT to support workloads not supported by VMware. Data is deduplicated across all protected data, not just by backup job. (Note that testing was designed simply to prove deduplication capability, not to evaluate deduplication rates.)

Fast, Flexible Restore

Next, the Lab reviewed the ability of Backup Exec 2014 to execute fast, flexible restores. Restores can be to dissimilar hardware, and P2V, V2P, and B2V are all supported. The first task was to create virtual machines from backups of physical servers. As shown in Figure 8, the Backup Exec conversion wizard was launched by the Lab to create a virtual machine from a backup of server becompfile002.

Figure 8. Backup Exec P2V Conversion Wizard

The wizard directed the process by presenting clearly defined steps for each selection option. As shown in Figure 9, ESG Lab selected Microsoft Hyper-‐V as the hypervisor to be used for the conversion. The left side of the figure shows the Hyper-‐V server that will host the new VM as well as the new name of the virtual machine, VM-‐BECOMPFILE002. The “VM” was appended to the beginning of the virtual machine host name to distinguish it from the physical host in the environment. Lastly, the right side of Figure 9 shows the new VM running on the Microsoft Hyper-‐V server through the Hyper-‐V Manager view.



Figure 9. Microsoft Hyper-‐V Manager View of the P2V Conversion

Next, ESG Lab tested the granular restore options that speed recovery of specific items using the Microsoft Exchange database we had previously backed up. Backup Exec 2014 displayed the context-‐specific restore options available, as shown on the left side of Figure 10; because we had used the Exchange agent-‐assisted backup, granular restore options were available.

ESG Lab tested two options for selecting individual e-‐mail messages for recovery: browsing and keyword search. The Lab browsed the Exchange mailbox directory from the VM backup of BECOMPDC, as shown in the top right of Figure 10; selected one user’s Inbox; and selected two messages from that Inbox. Next, the Lab executed a keyword search for the word “write” for all mailboxes in backups over a 24-‐hour period. As shown in the bottom right, Backup Exec located and displayed numerous individual messages containing the word “write.” ESG Lab selected three e-‐mails and restored them to a .pst file.



Figure 10. Exchange Restore Options

Why This Matters Fast, flexible restore is essential to virtual backup best practices because organizations must be able to resume production operations as quickly as possible. Users are rapidly becoming accustomed to the agility of virtual environments, increasing their demand for high availability. If the restore can include only what the user needs and no more, the recovery and return to productivity is that much faster.

ESG Lab validated two specific Backup Exec 2014 capabilities that speed restore. The Lab converted a backup of a physical server to a VM, effectively reducing downtime for a server failure to just the time it takes to start up the server as virtual machine. In addition, ESG Lab used both browsing and keyword search to execute a granular recovery of individual e-‐mails from an Exchange database backup.



Post-‐process Application Handling

Next, ESG Lab performed an object-‐level restore of a SQL Server database backup of BECOMPFS5, a VMware guest. Using the Restore wizard, as shown in the left side of Figure 11, the Lab navigated to SQL Server and selected the Model database. Wizard windows (shown on the right) guided us through the restore process. The Lab chose the following application handling options: restore the latest backup, overwrite the existing database, and have Backup Exec 2014 automatically take the databases offline. It should be noted that the option to run additional commands before and after the SQL backup job was available, as shown at the bottom right side of Figure 11, though it was not tested in this particular SQL backup.

Figure 11. SQL Server Restore Options

Finally, ESG Lab used the CLI to create pre-‐ and post-‐commands (c:\pre.cmd and c:\post.cmd) to run on a file server (BECOMPFILE002) being backed up (see Figure 12). The Lab created a full backup job of a few log files and launched it. The pre-‐command ran, and Backup Exec 2014 halted the application, executed the backup, and then ran the post-‐command. The pre and post folders created in the C: drive directory (and time stamps) proved that both commands were executed as scheduled.



Figure 12. Pre-‐ and Post-‐commands

Why This Matters Virtual backup solutions should facilitate the necessary post-‐process application tasks, whether using injectable agents or recursive mechanisms. This best practice enhances application awareness in the backup workflow, enabling the application to automatically perform its required log truncation and other tasks once a backup has completed.

ESG Lab validated that Backup Exec 2014 can expedite application-‐aware post processing. The Lab created pre-‐ and post-‐backup commands that were executed properly before and after a full backup job.



ESG Lab Validation Highlights þ ESG Lab found that Backup Exec 2014 fulfilled each of the virtual backup best practices as defined. þ The Lab also found that Backup Exec 2014 was well integrated with the latest Microsoft Hyper-‐V and

VMware virtual backup features, making it easy to back up virtual environments with flexible options. Also, comprehensive support for disk, tape, and cloud expands the options for each customer environment.

þ ESG Lab was impressed with Backup Exec 2014’s fast, flexible restore options such as granular restore of files, folders, or application objects; restore to dissimilar hardware; and P2V, V2P, and B2V that make disaster recovery and server migration simple to implement. ESG Lab used the simple workflow to quickly and easily conduct a P2V operation.

þ ESG Lab found that Backup Exec 2014 delivered simple, centralized management for both physical and virtual data protection, including the ability to monitor all backup jobs from one view, and to manage multiple hosts using a single backup job.

þ Symantec has made improvements in the GUI to more easily distinguish between physical and virtual machines. Especially notable is the addition of a separate pane showing the status of virtual hosts and their guest machines.

þ Application protection integration remains strong with the solution. ESG Lab conducted object-‐level restores of Microsoft Exchange and used the new search feature to identify and recover individual e-‐mail messages within Exchange.

þ ESG Lab found the fully integrated deduplication across all protected data an effective way to streamline capacity requirements.

Issues to Consider þ Backup Exec 2014 does not currently include an instant recovery capability, although it is planned for the

future. þ The catalog and history captured by Backup Exec 2014 enable granular search capabilities. However, ESG

recommends making the search function accessible on the main menu, so that it can be more easily applied globally across the protected environment.

þ IT can tailor the administrative console to show how much of a job’s capacity has been backed up, enabling them to use the total capacity of the job to calculate what percentage of the backup has completed. However, because “percent complete” is a popular and useful metric, ESG Lab recommends making it a default that does not require calculation.



The Bigger Truth Few realize that Backup Exec was one of the earliest backup applications to integrate with VMware. While some customers believe that virtualization-‐specific solutions are required to protect VMs, Backup Exec has been a leading protection provider for both physical and virtual environments for quite some time. You could chalk that up to a marketing gap on Symantec’s part—it wouldn’t be the first vendor to offer a really valuable feature without effectively telling customers about it. More likely, it is due to an abundance of caution left over from the early days of virtualization, when IT teams separated virtual backups from physical first due to architectural limitations, and later to ensure that their carefully designed and managed backup process was not adversely affected by adding VMs to the mix.

Whatever the reason, it’s worth noting that Symantec is not new to the VM backup game—a fact that was clearly demonstrated during ESG Lab testing. The latest improvements that arrived with Backup Exec 2014 are intended to ensure that customers protecting virtual machines will benefit from Symantec’s decades of experience. Management improvements make better protection possible and help to streamline administrative costs, while built-‐in deduplication helps minimize storage and bandwidth needs, a critical cost-‐saver particularly in growing virtual deployments. The extensive protection and recovery options available, in addition to application-‐awareness features, demonstrate Symantec’s focus on the truly important part of the protection equation: fast, easy, flexible recovery and return to business productivity. Backup Exec is a powerful, flexible, easy-‐to-‐use solution that makes protecting data in physical, virtual, and hybrid environments fast, simple, and efficient.

It is worth noting that when certain functionalities were aggregated and simplified in Backup Exec 2012, these functions became less visible, causing consternation for some long-‐standing customers. Symantec has made those functions once again highly visible in Backup Exec 2014, so customers gain the improved GUI with dashboards and wizards, but can still manage backups in the way to which they are accustomed. ESG applauds Symantec for listening to its customers and finding a way to respond without compromising on new features.

Plenty of over-‐hyped technologies on the market and in the media today might benefit your environment, or they might not. With virtualization, there is no doubt: the difference that virtualization can make in business costs and application availability cannot be overstated and as a result, it is rapidly becoming the preferred server deployment method. In addition, the density of VMs per physical host is increasing—good for TCO, but often exacerbating backup and recovery challenges for virtual environments.

For customers looking to address VM data protection, certain best practices can ensure optimal protection and recovery characteristics. These include easy and intuitive monitoring and management, multi-‐hypervisor integration, deduplication to deal with the consequences of VM sprawl, fast restore options, and post-‐process application handling.

So how would ESG Lab rate Backup Exec 2014 in terms of these best practices? Our testing indicates that Symantec has hit every best practice in the center of the target. Bullseye.



Appendix Table 2. ESG Lab Test Bed Detail

Operating Systems and Software

Symantec Backup Exec Version: Backup Exec 2012, Backup Exec 2014

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Version: Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-‐V

VMware vSphere Version: vSphere 5.0

Microsoft MS-‐Exchange Version: Exchange 2012

Microsoft MS-‐SQL Version: SQL Server 2012

Servers

Dell Model: PowerEdge R815 CPU: AMD Opteron Memory: 24 GB RAM

Dell Model: PowerEdge R610 CPU: Quad Core Intel Xeon Memory: 24 GB RAM

Storage Dell Model: PowerVault MD3600

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2014.

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Technology

ESG Lab Validation Report: Achieving Best Practices for Virtual Machine Backup & Recovery with Symantec Backup Exec 2014