Cloning VMs like corporate backups

[anxo_compin]

Good afternoon,

I have a client which uses vCenter cloning as a backup.

It does not use a third-party software to do the backups, it only has the clone of every VM of the vSphere like a backup.

I told you that is not a good practice about it, that they must use another backup tools to do it, like Veeam, for example.

If they have only the clones like a backup, if the datastore is down, they would lose this information.

I would use snapshot and clone to test before doing in production environment, like patch one server or something like that, but not like a backup.

What is the opinion and the best practices of VMware related with this topic?

Thank so much.

[Lalegre]

,

As you clearly have mentioned, cloning VMs in the same Datastore as where the live servers are running is not a backup, the idea of the backup is to protect in case of a failure on the Storage array. It could work anyways if the application breaks unexpectedly but that is not a backup itself.

In terms of vCenter, file-based backup can be used to protect it and restore in case something happens. 

In summary, a backup tool should be used in order to protect the infrastructure properly.

[anxo_compin]

 Thank so much for your answer.

And, if the clon was in a different datastore, would this make sense?

[Lalegre]

,

It would make sense as you have an integral copy of the server, however, what is complex is the time and effort you need to put to perform a simple backup by not using a lot of integrations every backup tool has.

[AnaghB]

Hello  ,

Cloning a VM is not a backup because of 2 issues.

1. The cloned copy will only contain the data which was present at the time of cloning. All the changes post that will only be present on original VM and not on cloned VM.

2. If the datastore is corrupted then we loose both original and cloned VM and there is nothing to fall back on.

3. Using Snapshots is of no use because when tragedy strikes even the snapshot disks will be affected. Moreover multiple snapshots on the VM will make it very slow and more than 32 snapshots can cause issues where data is at risk.

Proposed Solutions:

1. Use backup solutions like Veeam to ensure that all your VMs have backup with latest data. This is recommendation from Vmware and all other software parties and fall under best practice.

2. Take a daily clone of the VM and save it to another datastore. This is manual task which requires alot of efforts but this way you will always have a copy of VM which is 1 day old on a different datastore so that if primary datastore is corrupted then you can restore. This is not recommended or solution from Vmware but we can use it as workaround if we want to avoid backup solution for 1-2 VMs.

 

[Evon Nguyen]

Hi, do you have any info on obtaining and installing Veeam? The current Vsphere that I am working on has no backup tool. Any info would be greatly appreciated. 

[LisandrodeCuba]

couldn’t be more right. All the mentioned cons. Would also advise third party tool, my choice would be veeam for its straightforward and user friendly use. 

[AnaghB]

Hello  ,

Thank you for compliment. Personally even I recommend Veeam for backup solution. 

[zcyd]

I know this is an old thread but there are a lot of presumption here about what is and what is not a backup. A backup is simply a copy of something. If the copy does not protect against all events it does not mean that it is not a backup. It just means it's not an ideal backup or not failsafe. Having a clone of a VM on the same datastore is still a backup, but it's only a backup that protects against VM level data loss and leaves the data vulnerable to hardware events, so not really recommended.

While it's often said that snapshots are not backup, it technically is a backup because there a second copy that can be restored from. The problem is it's not a failsafe and only protects against a limited set of events, so snapshot should only be used as temporary backups.  

---

1. The cloned copy will only contain the data which was present at the time of cloning. All the changes post that will only be present on original VM and not on cloned VM.

---

This is an odd statement because most backups are point in time backups and will have some RTO (even with CDP).

Pedantry aside, I agree that a commercial backup solution would be best.