vSphere Data protection has a bigger brother called VDP Advanced. This advanced version of VDP scales up to 8Tb of deduplication storage as well as 400 VMs per VDP appliance. That’s rather good news (if you’re not using anything else out there for much less) for medium sized companies willing to use that product, but were kind of stuck, because of the limitations of the VDP appliance. The VDP classic provides up to 2Tb of deduplicated data with possibility to protect up to 100 VMs.
Other functions of the VDP advanced remains the same, it’s possible to upgrade the VDP “classic” to VDP Advanced, and also it’s possibly to add capacity dynamically as the needs for larger capacity deduplication store grows (this wasn’t the case in the Standard version).
VDP in general is easy to deploy. You can read my articles about how-to install and configure the VDP here. vSphere Data Protection (VDP) – install, configure, manage (Step by step Serie of 3 posts).
VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Advanced – the Features
- 8Tb of Deduplicated storage – per VDP advanced appliance
- 400 VMs per appliance
- Migration possibility from Standard to Advanced
- SQL Agent - recovery of the entire application, individual databases, or only logs
- Exchange Server Agent – recovery of individual databases with options to restore to special Exchange databases to perform granular recovery of mailboxes and messages
A screenshot from the VDP product page.
Technical Requirements to run VDP standard and advanced.
Both VDP appliances can run in vSphere 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 where vCenter Server 5.1 is required to manage this backup product. It’s not possible to operate VDP or VDP advanced without vCenter Server as both VDP appliances requires the new vSphere Web client.
If you’re still using vSphere Data Recovery product together with vSphere 4.1, then you can still continue to use it. But if you migrate to vSphere 5.1 you have to migrate to VDP as vSphere 5.1 does not support VDR.
Concerning Microsoft Exchange or SQL support through agents, the Exchange 2003, 2007 or 2010 are supported for application consistency if running on Microsoft Windows 2008 and later.
There is no upgrade path from vSphere Data Recovery – rather strange. How simple admin that has many VM backed up and archived under VDR can possibly migrate those to VDP? Keep the old infrastructure in place?…. Not quite clear…
Continue reading about licensing and further details on next page –>
Article by Vladan SEGET
Vladan is as an Independent consultant, vExpert 2009 - 2013, VCP 4/5 and owner of this website. Feel free to subscribe via RSS
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You can’t migrate from VDR to VDP. The way the backups are made is totally different. The only solution is to re-create the jobs
Yes, it’s a shame that kind of conversion tool does not exists. It would enable to decomission the VDR appliance completely. Like this you still have to keep it somewhere available, together with vCenter 4… -:).