Alike A3/V7 Documentation

Backup Jobs

The A3 backup job provides high performance, gloabally deduplicated protection for your virtual, or physical environments.

Full or Incremental?

In Alike, all backups can be thought of as 'full' backups, as there is no 'master' backup to maintain. All backup jobs typically only need to write a small portion of your disk by using whitespace awareness, changed block tracking, delta data analysis, and a variety of other sophisticated optimizations.

Alike Backups Aren't Incrememental
As long as you have a valid ADS or ODS, you can restore any backup from any point-in-time, and all backups have identical restore performance--nearly instant recovery.

Additionally, every backup can be used to perform a full VM restore directly to any hypervisor (regardless of the source), a VHD restore of the disks, or an instant File Level restore to quickly access files/folders from the backup. The A3 also features instant VM restore that can recover an entire VM in seconds.

Enhanced and Q-Hybrid Methods

For all Editions of Alike, there are two major methods for performing a backup: Enhanced (agentless) or Q-Hybrid (agent-based).

Hypervisor-Based Backups

Enhanced, or agentless backups, use hypervisor snapshots. This is the simplest, and most common way to backup your systems. Enhanced is agnostic to contents of a disk and support backup of any VM that can be snapshotted. Using Enhanced will exactly reproduce exact disk images from the time of the snapshot.

Q-Hybid Backups

Q-Hybrid is an agent-based backup that targets Windows systems. Q-Hybrid needed to protect physical systems that aren't running on a hypervisor. You can also use Q-Hybrid as an alternative to Enhanced backups, when available.

Q-Hybrid accesses Windows machines via an agent
It's useful when hypervisor-based snapshots are undesirable or not possible, or when you want to protect a physical Windows machine.

For more information on Q-Hybrid and physical backup, please see Q-Hybrid

Enhanced Backup Overview

  • ABD provisioning (Xen only): If you are backing up a VM on XenServer, Alike will provision an ABD. See XenServer Configuration for more details.
  • Hypervisor Snapshot: The A3 will request a snapshot of your VM. Please note you will need enough space on your hypervisor's disks.
  • Data Acquisition: This phase is also known as the "munge" phase. Alike will back up your disk and send changed data blocks to the A3 in compressed form.
  • Cleanup: Snapshots and other resources on the hypervisor are released.
  • Metadata commit: The A3 will wrap up your backup by storing all metadata generated by the backup.
Enhanced Backup is the Bread and Butter of A3 Backups
These scalable, high-performance backups require minimal configuration and can protect any virtual machine that can be snapshotted by your hypervisor.

Basic Backup Job Creation

To create a new Backup Job in Alike: Jobs->New Job option in the menu, then select "Backup". alt text

As shown, you simply select and drag the VMs you wish to backup to the list on the right hand side.

Dynamic VM Selection

Alike allows you to dynamically include VMs in a backup job, by use of a keyword. This keyword match will be run prior to each run of the job, and any matching VM (on any licensed host) will be included. For XenServer users, Alike also allows the ability to match XenServer Tags. alt text

Backup Options

Below the VM selection, there are additional job options to consider.

Enhanced or Q-Hybrid

This lets you choose your technology: Enhanced or Q-Hybrid. This is a job wide setting, so all systems included in the job will use this method.

Enabling Changed Block Tracking (CBT)

This option is for Enhanced Jobs only. CBT provides a signficantly faster means to backup your VMs, but comes at the cost of storage overhead on your hypervisor host/SR.

Disk & Memory snapshots

XenServer Only. This option will include the VM's memory state in the backup, allowing you to restore to a (suspended) VM with its memory intact.

Number of simultaneous VMs to process

This defaults to 1, forcing Alike to process the selected VMs 1 at a time. You may increase this number to whatever amount your environment can handle. Increasing this number will typically reduce the length of the backup job in total, but can cause increased load on your environment with multiple backups occuring simultaneously.

More simultaneous backups is not necessarily better. Backups request snapshots and cause I/O load. Always scale up slowly to make sure running more simultaneous backups is appropriate for your environment.

Always perform full/baseline

This will cause Alike to ignore any source-side deduplication for the job. This should only be used when troubleshooting or when instructed by technical support. Enabling this option will slow down the backup job significantly.