What Is VMware VADP and How It Helps Backup VM?

VMware is widely used for companies to deploy virtual environment and is regarded as the best virtualization solution in the world. Virtual machine helps companies reduce IT cost and improve system performance. Although virtual machine is not real server, it still needs to be protected so VM backup is necessary.

VMware has released some VM backup services for users, like VMware Consolidate Backup, VMware Data Recovery, vSphere Data Protection, VADP (VMware vStorage API for Data Protection), etc. Most of the services have been stopped for some reason but VADP is still available.

What is VMware VADP?

VMAP, VMware vStorage API for Data Protection, as the successor to VMware Consolidated Backup, is a mechanism first released in VMware vSphere 4.0 for VM backup and recovery. With this technology, users can backup VM to a backup server without installing other applications in VM.

VADP allows users to make full or incremental VM backup and recover VM in file level. If the guest is using Windows operating system, VSS, Windows Volume Shadow Copy Servers, can be used to guarantee data consistency.

How to download VADP?

If you go to the official site of VMware to search the resouce of this API, you might get no information about that because there is no SDK named VADP. In fact, VADP consists of two SDKs. One is vSphere Management SDK (which has been anounced deprecated so you needed to find the alternative) and the other is VDDK.

Virtual Disk Development Kit. vSphere Management SDK supports Java and C# and you can find many other third-party SDKs for this like Perl and Python. VDDK supports C/C++ and as you can tell from its name, it is used for management. With it, users can access vCenter or ESXi to manage resources like host, storage, datacenter, resouce pool, etc. Compared with it, the features of VDDK are much simpler because VDDK is used to operate virtual disk, read and write data, etc.

How does VADP help backup VM?

VADP has optimized the procedures of how VCB backup VMware VM.

1. Call the vSphere SDK API to create a snapshot of the target VM

2. Call the Virtual Disk Library in VDDK to access the newly-created snapshot and read the virtual disk file. If the file system of guest OS needs to be accessed, users can call the Virtual Disk Mount API in VDDK to mount virtual disk to local machine and then visit the file system of guest OS like visiting the file system of local machine.

3. Backup virtual disk or files in the file system of guest OS to the target datastore.

4. Call the vSphere SDK API to delete the snapshot created in step 1

VADP and CBT

CBT, Changed Block Tracking, can be enabled with VADP. It makes VMKernel remember which data blocks have been changed since the last backup to support native incremental backup.

The procedures of how CBT works are as follows:

1. Create VM snapshot and make a full VM backup with the snapshot

2. Read the ChangeId of the snapshot via vSphere API

3. Call the queryChangedDiskAreas in vSphere API and send it to the ChangeId as the parameter. Acquire the changed blocks since the last snapshot full backup and save the changed blocks as the incremental backup.

4. Repeat step 3 to create daily incremental backup

5. Repeat step 1-4 to complete weekly backup plan

It is obvious that CBT has greatly shortened the backup window and reduced the I/O burden of underlying equipment. However, CBT is disabled by default because it will influence VM performance more or less.

Backup VMware vSphere with Vinchin Backup & Recovery

To backup VMware vSphere, you can have a better solution, Vinchin Backup & Recovery.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a professional backup and disaster recovery solution for virtual environments like VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, XenServer, Red Hat Virtualization, Sangfor HCI, etc. This means you can manage different virtual environments in a centralized control panel.

Agentless backup is also supported in Vinchin Backup & Recovery so you just need to add the host to the backup system to select and backup any VMs.

There will be a user-friendly web console to help you easily finish every step and many useful backup strategies to let you make backup plan in every way like schedule, incremental backup, differential backup, data encryption, data compression, etc.

In addition, Vinchin Instant Recovery technology will let you quickly recover a failed VM from backup in 15 seconds to reduce RTO and Vinchin Virtual Machine Convert Engine will let you freely move VM between different virtual environments.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery has been selected by thousands of companies to protect and manage virtual environments, you can also start to use this powerful system with a 60-day full-featured free trial. Just click the button to get the installation package.

Sum Up

VMware VADP uses two SDKs, vSphere Management SDK and VDDK to make VMware VM backup. It optimizes and simplifies the backup procedures of VMware Consolidate Backup and brings new features like CBT.

You can also try Vinchin Backup & Recovery as your backup solution. Don’t miss the free trial