A month ago I wrote about the 8 ways of protecting VMware that Data Protector 6.1 is offering and I promised to go into detail on each of them. After a month of vacation and travel I finally get to start the series. I want to start with the most basic one - Suspend virtual machine.

There are things to consider when protecting a virtual environment. One is the overall virtual machine setup and the complete virtual machine including the OS. The other one is the applications inside the machine. While you want to protect the complete setup only when you change either OS settings or VMware settings the application data needs to be protected more frequently.

Suspend virtual machine is a solution to protect the entire virtual machine. In order to ensure no I/O is being executed on the machine while the backup is happening the machine is frozen via a command. This is similar to hibernate the physical server and do a raw disk backup of the disks from another machine. This has obviously very high impact on the virtual machine itself and the usability of the machines. One use case could be that you do this kind of "offline backup" after a maintenance of your environment when you anyhow planned for downtime.

For protecting the application data inside the virtual machine this method would only make sense if you have a clear downtime window where you can shutdown the application. We believe other methods DP provide are better suited for that.

Once the virtual machine is frozen the data is accessed on the ESX server and moved to any target supported by Data Protector. This allows you to use the full flexibility of Data Protectors infrastructure and you can use either disk or tape as a target.

Recovery of such a backup would simply restore the data to the ESX server and start up the virtual machine.