By Harald Burose

This week we had a major launch of HP Data Protector 6.1, see http://www.hp.com/go/imhub.  A key message of the launch is protection in the virtual environment. Data Protector provides solutions for various hypervisors from Integrity VM, Hyper-V environments to XEN. Specifically for VMWare – the marketshare leader in virtualization - HP Data Protector offers you 8 ways to protect your virtual environment:

1.  Suspend virtual machine

2.  Traditional Online backup extension in the virtual machine

3.  ESX Snapshot via the console

4.  Recovery of ESX Snapshots

5.  VMware Consolidated Backup

6.  FULL restore of VM

7.  Zero Downtime Backup

8.  Instant Recovery

You might say – shouldn’t one way be sufficient? – and the answer is simple – no. Virtual environments are no different than physical environments in that a single solution doesn’t fit all. Take LAN based backup – for servers with a small amount of data, a valid solution for an application server with 1 TB could be to perform the backup locally to a direct connected device. In addition, you would do the application backup different than your system backup that you use for disaster recovery. Virtual environments are now different in that regards. An image backup of your system volume needs a different method than your file level data. For application data you are concerned about application consistency and recovery times and therefore need different options for protecting your virtual environment.  It's because of this that Data Protector offers you a choice. How do the different methods work? What are the pros and cons of each and where do they fit best? This will be covered in a series of blogs that I am starting so stay tuned.