HPE Solutions with Commvault help protect HPE Morpheus VM Essentials VMs through image-based backups.
Transition your existing virtualized workloads to HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software. Streamline a VM-vending experience across VM Essentials and VMware vSphere platforms, and let HPE Solutions with Commvault protect your data.
Almost every business is taking a fresh look at its virtualization plans. With VMware licensing updates triggered by Broadcom, new technology, and AI workloads shaking things up, everyone wants to cut costs. At the same time, customers from a variety of industries frequently tell us that workloads are becoming more dispersed across heterogeneous environments, including various hypervisors, runtimes, locations, and clouds. At a time when businesses need flexibility the most, managing this complexity has become expensive and time-consuming.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has recently been offering HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software, a new virtualization solution that lets you manage both KVM and VMware virtual machines (VMs) through one easy-to-use interface. You get a KVM-based hypervisor, but it also works with your existing VMware licenses. It’s perfect if you’re thinking about trying alternatives to VMware, maybe starting with generalized workloads such as web, application, file, and database servers. The cool part is how it works with things like IP address management, DNS, and automation tools to make setting up VMs way easier.
You can learn more by reading the solution brief and watching an introduction video on VM Essentials.
But here’s the thing about VMs—since they share hardware, they can be a bit vulnerable to attackers trying to steal data or spread malware. If one VM gets compromised, it could affect all the others on the same network, so protecting them is super important.
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software is well known for its integration into dozens of third-party technologies. VM Essentials leverages that same pluggable abstraction framework to enable partner ecosystem integration, such as with data protection partners.
Commvault Cloud Backup and Recovery software has got your back when it comes to protecting your data, whether it’s in the cloud or on-site. They’ve just added a neat feature that lets you protect VMs in VM Essentials using image-based backup.
How is Commvault software protecting VM Essentials?
Commvault Cloud Backup and Recovery helps companies guarantee data availability even across various clouds by offering cost-effective cloud workload mobility, robust backup, and verifiable recovery. With a streamlined backup and recovery solution, you can manage all of your workloads from a single platform, including cloud, VMs, containers, apps, databases, and endpoints. Additionally, the flexible copy data management lets you use your backed-up data for DevOps, replication, and other purposes across your whole infrastructure.
Starting with version 11.40, Commvault Cloud Backup and Recovery supports image-based backup and recovery for VM Essentials VMs. This is way simpler than agent-based backups because you don’t need to install anything on each VM. It backs up everything necessary—the operating system, apps, settings, all of it.
Need to recover? You can restore the whole VM right where it was or spin up a new one in the public or hybrid cloud if the environment is configured for it. This really speeds up recovery time.
In our testing, we put the CommServe and MediaAgent on one physical server and installed the Commvault Virtual Server Agent on each VM Essentials cluster node. You’ll need at least 100 GB of free space on each node for this. Just install the agent package, register each node with the CommServe server, and you’re good to go.
Managing backups is straightforward through Commvault’s interface. Create a backup plan (Manage > Plans > Create plan), pick your storage policy and schedule, then assign your VMs or VM groups to the plan. Just enable Use backup plan, pick your plan from the list, and click save.
What about full recovery of VMs? Just choose the VM group, the VM to be recovered, and the destination, Commvault Cloud Backup and Recovery takes care of the rest. But let’s say a VM is corrupted or compromised. Then the VM is restored to its original location. If several VMs have been configured and are managed by the same instance of VM Essentials, then the image is restored as a new VM in the same cluster as the original VM (under a different name) or in a separate cluster.
You can also move a VM from one hypervisor stack to another by restoring the entire VM. A VMware VM can be backed up and then restored as a new VM in a VM Essentials cluster, for instance, if a VMware cluster has been installed.
Our tests show that Commvault’s backup strategies work great with VM Essentials. The image-based backups make recovery super quick, which helps keep your organization running smoothly and your data safe and sound.
To learn more about protecting VM Essentials with HPE Solutions with Commvault, check out the protecting VM Essentials using HPE Solutions with Commvault technical brief and be sure to visit HPE Solutions with Commvault website.
Meet the Author:
Parissa leads define sales enablement and go-to-market plan for HPE virtualization, containers, and data management solutions (cloud-enabled data protection for SAP HANA, Oracle, SQL Server), including driving joint enablement and collateral development with partners such as VMware, Veeam, Commvault, and Cohesity. Connect with Parissa on LinkedIn.
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