Top 3 VMware Backup Solutions

Protecting the virtual infrastructure and its data is a must for any IT administrator, and the market offers several valid solutions to choose from.

During the selection of spare products, various aspects should be taken into account: infrastructure complexity, supported platforms, types of backup, support, licensing, budget, etc.

In today’s time, the thrive for virtualization has become a new paradigm in the modern computer world.

The idea of ​​virtualization suddenly opened the way for mass virtual implementations, and the rapidly evolving trend inevitably brought problems to protect data, just as it did with hardware environments. Recognizing VM’s spare emergencies, VM’s reserve software vendors worked hard to meet market demands.

The results of the solutions have been multiplied since the early days, and the most advanced of them have an impressive amount to offer.

The backup solutions that will be described in this post are some of the products available on the market, and the sequence is based on user experience and ratings. However, the decision I use or prefer does not mean that it is a product that satisfies your business needs and fits into your environment. I only suggest to you what I think might fit in your software solutions in providing value to your operations.

1. Veeam VMware Backup and Replication

Veeam Backup & Replication is produced and executed for virtual environments. It works in the virtualization layer and uses VM-based image-based access. The backup does not install agent software in the VM guest operating system to retrieve the data. To back up VM, it uses VMware vSphere snapshot capabilities.

This backup is a complete software solution for VMware and Hyper-V virtual platforms as well that can be installed on physical or virtual machines with Windows and is suitable for small, medium, and business environments. The Veeam product matures with each release but remains reliable and easy to use and install. If you are looking for a product that works smoothly, then Veeam is your preferred option.

Software management is done through a simple interface that can be installed on administrator clients, where the user can manage multiple backup servers with a clean and intuitive layout.

They offer a traditional administration console or web-based console (for the enterprise version) that can track multiple backup servers at the same UI interface at the same time. There is also the option to activate the Veeam backup console that will only allow you to configure and monitor backups from your laptop or monitoring station without the need to open a remote connection to the backup server.

Veeam features

• Installation Platform: Windows (Windows Server). Physical or as a VM.
• Full VM Backup, Incremental backup, Copy backup, Replication, Cloud backup, Tape backup
• Restore Full VMs, Individual files within VMs, Individual applications items (AD, Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, Oracle)
• Run VMs from backup location: Yes
• Hypervisors: VMware, Hyper-V
• Free Solution: Yes (Veeam Community Edition — 10 instances only, check details on our Free Tools Page)
• Free Trial: Yes (60 Days full product trial — www.veeam.com than free version)
• Licensing: Per physical CPU Socket

2. Altaro VM Backup

Altaro VMware Backup is a fast, affordable, high-performance backup solution, specially developed for small and medium-sized markets of large corporations. An agile, rational solution that is easy to implement, rich in features, with outstanding support as part of the package.

Easy to use, intuitive interface — makes it easy to implement a rock-solid backup strategy. You can have complete control along with the scalability monitor and manage all your Hyper-V and VMware hosts from a single console.

When compared to other vendors, Altaro creates the smallest backup size, as well as faster backups and restores speed (fewer data to transfer). At the same time, storage retention continues to improve as more backups are added. Also, it offers the best deduplication in the industry not only to create the smallest backup size, but it also uses a variable block size for the best efficiency.

No matter how great your backup setup is, things can go wrong, so Altaro is committed to helping you ensure your solutions are up and running, right around the clock. Their team includes experts on standby 24/7. You will be chatting with a person, not any chatbots, nor any gatekeepers — not even an answering machine for canned responses.

It is an entirely professional operating platform that will satisfy your needs and improve your functioning.

Altaro features

• ConCurrency: Run more efficient backup operations, by allowing more VMs to be backed up at the same time, allowing you to reduce your defined backup window drastically
• Back up live VMs by leveraging Microsoft VSS with Zero downtime
• Full support for Cluster Shared Volumes & VMware vCenter
• Offsite Backup Replication for disaster recovery protection
• Compression and military-grade Encryption
• Schedule backups the way you want them
• Specify backup retention policies for individual VMs
• Backup VMs to multiple backup locations
• Cloud Backup to Azure — Backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account, the most cost-effective Azure storage option

3. Vembu Backup & Replication for VMware

Founded in 2004, Vembu is a provider of a portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium-sized businesses.

Vembu VMBackup is part of the Vembu BDR Suite. Vembu provides efficient, safe, and reliable VMware vSphere backup for small and medium-sized businesses with enterprise-level features at affordable prices.

Vembu VMBackup provides faster recovery options, which ensures that business continuity is not compromised.

Vembu’s team is continuously improving the product and keeping up with the latest technology by providing support for each new release on the platform.

Vembu has released the latest version of the Vembu BDR Suite v4.2 update 1 that fully supports VMware vSphere 7.

Vembu BDR Suite is the comprehensive solution if you need to recover disasters and backups, designed to protect virtual (VMware, Hyper-V), physical (Windows, Linux, and Mac), cloud workloads (AWS, Azure) and SaaS applications (Office 365, G Suite).

Details about Vembu Backup and Replication for VMware:

• Agentless VM Backup & Replication — which means that you can back up and replicate VMware virtual machines
• Flexible Backup/Replication Scheduling — you can run backups or replicate as frequently as every 15 minutes to achieve low RPO
• Incremental Backups — Vembu uses VMware CBT to perform incremental backups
• Application-Aware Backups — it creates application-consistent backups of VMs running Microsoft Exchange, SQL, AD, Sharepoint, and Oracle database
• Instant Boot VM — can resume operations of your crashed VM
• Granular Recovery — can instantly restore required files/folders
• Automatic backup verification
• Offsite Copy/Disaster Recovery — creates a copy of your backups to a local remote site or Public clouds: AWS/Azure/Google or Vembu Cloud or Tape drives for disaster recovery purposes