I’m going back over some of the new differences in Avamar 6.1 and am very impressed with the enhancements that Avamar now has with VMware image based backups. Before version 6.1 you needed a seperate image proxy for Linux and a seperate proxy for Windows, now with the new proxy design both Operating Systems have been integrated into one proxy. Not only does the proxy support both OS’s but now it also supports File Level Recovery to both OS’s where as Windows was only supported previously. To be more specific; the Unified Proxy now supports Windows NTFS, and Linux ext2, ext3, and LVM. The proxy does NOT support the following: Windows GPT Partitions, Windows Dynamic disks, Extended Partitions, Encypted Partitions, Compressed Partitions, or XFS.
The Process: Once a Unified proxy is deployed into a VMware environment and a backup is initiated, a workorder is sent to the Proxy Appliance. The Proxy then identifies the VM’s current hypervisor and datastore. Once the VM’s location has been identified, the proxy will initialize a snapshot of the VM utilizing the vStorage API. Once the snapshot is created the proxy will mount the snapshot and identify any new data using the avtar process; only new data is sent to Avamar. Once the process is complete the snapshot is destroyed.
A couple great improvements for Image Level backups, I cant wait to see what’s next… maybe a vCenter plugin ? What other enhancements would you like to see ?
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