Backing Up Virtual Volumes

Article Snippet:

Last month Virtual Volumes celebrated it’s first year since it’s release as part of vSphere 6.0 see VVols First Year in Review.  Now more than ever, customers are asking how will Virtual Volumes play a role in their virtual infrastructure.  One of the more common questions I hear is how backup and recovery of VVols are handled, which inspired me to write this post. The list of supported storage and backup vendors for Virtual Volumes is growing and the way in which snapshots have been implemented in VVols make backing them up much more compelling.

So, how does Virtual Volumes affect backup software vendors? The answer is simple.  Backup software using VADP is for the most part unaffected. Virtual Volumes are modeled in vSphere exactly as today’s virtual disks. The VADP APIs used by backup vendors are fully supported on Virtual Volumes just as they are on vmdk files on a LUN. Snapshots created by backup software using VADP will look the same to both vSphere and the backup software as non-VVol based snapshots, though on-array the snapshots are actually Virtual Volume objects.

See the full article – https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/04/19/backing-up-virtual-volumes/