Accelerator V3 – Faster and more efficient Virtual Machine backups – Powered by ReFS Block Cloning
Backup Exec 22.2 brings you faster virtual machine backups powered by ReFS block cloning technology. Consolidate full backups with the help of ReFS block cloning deliver up to 95% of performance improvement. With forever incremental backups targeted to ReFS block cloning supported volume, the consolidate full backup job creates new independent backup set by cloning unique blocks from previous backup sets and hence the consolidate full job runs faster as it does not involve any heavy-duty disk I/O calls. The clone operation only updates the reference count of blocks being cloned; this helps run consolidation backup job faster.
For previous version of accelerator features visit Accelerator V1 and Accelerator V2.
ReFS provides reference count to copied blocks. This reference count records the number of distinct blocks that reference the same region. This allows multiple files to share the same physical data saving disk space. In the following example we can see that all the blocks from consolidate full backups are the same. Hence only reference count is increased instead of writing these blocks again saving disk space.
* For cloned block only reference count is increased, and block is not written again saving disk space and write time.
For VMware, extents in the Full and Incremental jobs are always virtual disk allocation unit (grain) aligned, and the grain size is 64K. So effectively the extents are ReFS cluster size aligned and hence VMDK consolidation results in cloning of all extents. So, all VMware consolidate full backup jobs show up to 99% improvement. For Hyper-V this may vary due to variable block size. In some cases where blocks are not ReFS cluster size aligned then less performance gains can be seen. It would be beneficial for Hyper-V to have VM (Virtual Machine) virtual disks with same cluster size as ReFS Disk Storage cluster size.
Forever Incremental Backups eliminates the need to constantly take full backups from the source every week by consolidating the previous full and incremental backups. A consolidated full backup is equivalent to a full backup from the source virtual machine. Consolidate full backup set can be used for all types of restores, such as virtual machine restores, GRT (Granular Restore Technology) data restores, application GRT restore, Instant Recovery, and Recovery Ready. Providing greater flexibility to restore complete VM and individual items from same monolithic backup.
Disk space saved during consolidation phase is displayed in backup job log.
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