How Important to have a Correct Backup Solution

How Important to have a Correct Backup Solution. Backup Academy is the best place to get in if you’re dealing with virtualization and backup of VMs. Recently, Rick Vanover posted an excellent presentation and demo video in the backup academy about “How to do a backup wrong: Top mistakes.”

Does this topic sound different? Usually, we hear best practices of backup, etc., from experts like Rick. With this video, he came up with an excellent topic with his 15 years of experience in IT(virtualization). Watch this video from here.

How Important to have a Correct Backup Solution

How Important to have a Correct Backup Solution
Image – How Important to have a Correct Backup Solution

The content of the video is exciting and of utmost useful if you’re into backup solutions. This video is handy for all IT pros who are using Virtual servers for hosting their application also. This would help to understand the gotchas of VM backups.

In this post, I’ll try to highlight some topics which I found very useful. All my SCCM/ConfigMgr servers are already virtualized (that could be the case for you as well), so it’s essential to understand VM backup-related topics also.

1) Backup Products should be matched with a platform. VMware, vSphere, and Hyper-V supportability have a big impact.

2) Platforms and Design MUST include the domain of failure in the design of backup for VMs.

3) Files, Application Data, and Expectations – Files may not be enough to satisfy restore requirements. Special applications like SCCM and email systems may require special attention while taking backup. Otherwise, the recovery or restoration won’t work as expected.

4) Consistency Levels – Different products on different platforms may offer different consistency levels in the backup. VSS is introduced in Windows, and that reduced loads of overheads of application-level backup as well.

5) Missing VMs from Backup – growing virtualization makes “missing VMs” worse. An automatic way of VMs to the backup solution.

6) Error and Alert Notification – Backup failure notifications and alerts. The right person gets the alerts via Email or pager. This is important the alerts are addressed properly and resolved in time. Fine-tune the alerts and only require alerts to be sent across.

7) Capacity Calculations – Designing a backup solution takes into account several metrics. DE duplication can help avoid doing backups wrong windows Server 2012 can help avoid shortages.

8) Backup Frequency and Avoid Taking the wrong type of backup.

9) It’s always better to keep Multiple copies of backup.

10) Don’t overcomplicate Backup solutions with iSCSI in-guest, Raw Devices Mapping (RDM), etc.

Resources

Free SCCM Training Part 1 | 17 Hours Of Latest Technical Content | ConfigMgr Lab HTMD Blog (anoopcnair.com)

How To Disable SCCM Application Deployment | ConfigMgr | MEMCM – HTMD Blog #2 (howtomanagedevices.com)

Anoop is Microsoft MVP! He is a Solution Architect in enterprise client management with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is a blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. E writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc…

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