During VMworld I quickly wrote down the steps that VMware vCenter Data Recovery takes when backing up VMs. I added one step which isn’t unimportant, changed block tracking(4):
- Create a snapshot of disk(s)
- Hot add disk(s) to Data Recovery appliance
- Create hashes of (hopefully variable) blocks
- Read data of changed blocks if previous backup exists
- Dedupe(using variable chunk sizes) and create SHA1 hash for index
- Store data (possibly encrypted)
- Remove hot add disk(s)
- Remove snapshot
Compared to the current VCB installable and current feature set VI 3.5 offers this is a huge enhancement. (VMware vCenter Data Recovery will be part of the vSphere products.) Creating deduplicated back ups of only the changed blocks based on variable chunk sizes will give every user the opportunity to have a decent backup scheme. VMware vCenter Data Recovery utilizes the new VMware Consolidated Backup API by the way. For those afraid that the dedupe datastore gets corrupted an automated short integrity check is performed once a day and a thorough integrity check once a week.
Keep in mind that not only VMware will be able to utilize these new features. Because VCB is changed to an API a much tighter integration with 3rd party backup tools can be expected in the near future!
I would love to get my hands on a beta version of the product as soon as it’s available to play around with it some more and tell you more about the rich feature set this product will have. Unfortunately it’s not available yet and you will all have to wait, but I will keep you posted.