HP Software Brief Sample

The most widely used backup method employed in virtualized environments is placing an on-line backup agent inside the virtual machine. This is the standard backup method used in the physical world today. The on-line agent is ‘application aware’, communicating to the application that a backup or restore is occurring.

What happens when a backup is performed with an on-line agent placed inside a virtual machine? The on-line agent consumes resources just as it did in the physical world. CPU, memory and network interfaces are all called upon to support the backup process. The difference in a virtualized environment is that all virtual machines are impacted, not just the standalone server in the physical world. The paradigm of consistent workloads is broken, and the physical server hosting the VMs is also impacted.