Top 6 VMware Backup Solutions For 2024

In the ever-evolving landscape of virtualization technology, VMware stands as a cornerstone, empowering organizations to enhance efficiency, flexibility, and resource utilization in their IT infrastructure. As businesses increasingly rely on VMware for their virtualization needs, the importance of robust backup solutions cannot be overstated. The resilience of your virtualized environment depends on effective backup strategies, ensuring data integrity, business continuity, and disaster recovery.

In this blog, we delve into the realm of VMware backup solutions, exploring the top six options that cater to the diverse needs of businesses. Whether you are a small enterprise or a large corporation, the right backup solution can make a significant difference in safeguarding your critical data. Join us on this exploration of cutting-edge VMware backup solutions that go beyond traditional data protection, offering features that align with the dynamic demands of modern IT environments.

1. BDRSuite – Our Top Pick for VMware Backup and Replication

BDRSuite is a comprehensive and cost-effective VMware backup solution to backup and replicate VMware virtual machines on ESXi host and vCenter Server. Offers agentless backups, CBT-based incremental, automated backups, flexible recovery, and more.

● Agentless Backup and Recovery:

• No need for additional agents on the VMware infrastructure
• Streamlined backup and recovery processes for ESXi & vCenter Server

● Application-Aware Backup:

• Support for Microsoft applications and Oracle
• Ensures consistency and integrity of application data during backup

● Incremental Backup:

• Utilizes VMware Changed Block Tracking for efficient incremental backups
• Reduces backup times and optimizes storage usage

● Instant VM Boot and Live Migration:

• Instantly restore virtual machines in less than 15 minutes
• Seamless live migration to the target ESXi host for flexibility

● Versatile Backup Storage Options:

• Store backup data on various platforms: Local disk, NAS, SAN, Tape, AWS, Azure, Google, Wasabi, and more

● Agentless VM Replication:

• Replicate virtual machines without the need for agents
• Failover and failback capabilities for robust disaster recovery

● Network and IP Mapping:

• Establish mapping between source and destination ESXi
• Ensures smooth communication during replication and failover

● Secure Data Transfer Modes:

• Utilizes VMware Hot-Add and SAN transport mode
• Ensures both security and high-speed data transfer

● Support for Virtual Volumes (VVOL) and Virtual SAN (vSAN):

• Comprehensive backup solutions for modern VMware infrastructures

● Cross-Platform Migration:

• Facilitates both Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migrations
• Enhances flexibility and adaptability of virtualized environments

Key Benefits of BDRSuite:

• FREE VMware Backup: BDRSuite offers free backup for up to 10 VMware VMs with all core backup and recovery features.
• Cost-Effective Backup: With BDRSuite, you can backup and protect your VMWare data at just $1.80/VM/month
• Free Trial: BDRSuite offers a 30-day free trial (Fully featured version) for you to explore in your environment. Download now!

2. Veeam

Veeam Backup & Replication is a software solution that provides image-level backups of virtual machines (VMs) in VMware vSphere environments. It treats VMs as objects, not as a set of files. When you back up VMs, Veeam Backup & Replication copies a VM image as a whole, at a block level. Image-level backups can be used for different types of restore, including Instant Recovery, entire VM restore, VM file recovery, file-level recovery, and so on. The backup technology is typically used for VMs with lower RTOs

To create a backup job, the Veeam Backup Manager process is started on the Veeam backup server. Veeam Backup Manager reads job settings from the Veeam Backup configuration database and creates a list of VM tasks to process (one task stands for one VM disk). Veeam Backup Manager connects to the Veeam Backup Service. When a backup job is initialized, the Veeam Backup Manager processes the list of VM tasks and sends them to the Veeam Data Mover Service. The Veeam Data Mover Service retrieves VM data from the source datastore, compresses and deduplicates it, and transfers it to the target datastore.

Cons:

• Expensive – Starts at 14$/VM/Month
• May require expertise for advanced features
• Need to purchase additional products/licenses for centralized m

3. Acronis

Acronis Backup for VMware is a backup and replication solution designed to protect VMware vSphere environments. It is powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine and is available in two editions: Standard and Advanced. The Standard edition is designed for small businesses. It provides basic backup and recovery features, while the Advanced edition is designed for larger businesses and provides more advanced features such as deduplication, compression, and encryption.

Acronis Backup for VMware is easy to install and use, and you can use VMware vCenter or a web console to manage backup and recovery tasks. It offers fast recovery time objectives (RTOs) and reduces your total cost of ownership (TCO). Acronis Cyber Protect is another comprehensive cloud-based backup solution for virtual environments, including VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Virtualization, Linux KVM, and Oracle VM Server. It offers disk-image backup, near-instant recovery, threat-agnostic anti-malware protection, and flexible reporting and management.

Cons:

• Expensive – Starts at 12$/VM/Month
• May require expertise for advanced features

4. Altaro VMware Backup

Altaro VM Backup is a backup and replication solution for VMware that provides flexibility and power to give you confidence in your backup strategy. It allows you to replicate data to an offsite location or a removable drive, restore individual files or emails, restore from different points in time, verify backup integrity, and minimize downtime. It removes complexities from VMware to enable you to easily manage backups and fast restores.

You can manage and monitor backups across all your VMware hosts in a single view. It also supports multiple cloud storage providers such as MS Azure, Amazon S3, and Wasabi, enabling you to store backups using the cloud provider of your choice easily. Altaro VM Backup fully supports VMware vCenter and allows you to retrieve individual files and Exchange emails straight from your VM backup. It also leverages immutable cloud storage assuring data cannot be erased, modified, or deleted by anyone for a set duration, providing an extra layer of security above the existing offsite storage functionality.

Altaro VM Backup is easy to implement, manage, and maintain. You can back up and replicate your VMware and Hyper-V VMs locally, across WAN, or to one of the cloud provider’s storage accounts supported (AWS, Azure, or Wasabi). The backups are very efficient as only changed data gets sent to your backup repository from where they are taken. You can try out Altaro VM Backup and see how easily you can securely back up and replicate your virtual machines. 24/7 support is included.

5. Unitrends VMware Backup

Unitrends offers a comprehensive backup solution for VMware environments, which is optimized for low recovery point objective (RPO) and near-zero recovery time objective (RTO) while offering enterprise-level business continuity. The solution is deeply integrated with vCenter and other VMware platforms and provides full VMware vSphere support, including network block device (NBD) compression, Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) version 8 datastores, VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), backup and replication of fault-tolerant virtual machines (VMs), vSAN 6.6, and Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM).

Unitrends helps VMware users meet their RTOs, RPOs, and retention requirements with both hypervisor and guest-level protection. You can protect just what’s needed, whether it’s an entire VM, a file, or just a single database. All VMware backup options provide application-level awareness to ensure data consistency as well as instant recovery and global deduplication for fast recovery and maximum retention.

Unitrends also offers application-aware backups for VMware VMs running Microsoft applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, and SQL, without requiring agents in every VM.

Unitrends Backup software is a prepackaged virtual appliance with fully integrated, backup, replication, deduplication, archive, and instant recovery. It can be run on VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or XenServer or deployed as a virtual machine (VM) within the Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services cloud.

6. NAKIVO Backup & Replication

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an all-in-one VMware backup solution enabling efficient data protection management from a single web-based console. The solution utilizes VMware’s native Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology to perform incremental backups. Smaller backups reduce storage space consumption and cut backup windows. In addition, backups are image-based and app-aware to ensure data consistency.

Multiple deployment options (Windows, Linux, NAS or virtual appliance) along with powerful automation features make the solution versatile and flexible. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can suit infrastructures of any size and complexity, easily scaling for thousands of virtual machines. On-site, offsite, cloud (Amazon S3, Wasabi, Azure Blob, Backblaze B2, among others) and tape backup destinations allow you to eliminate a single point of failure.

The variety of recovery options to restore full VMs or individual files and app objects enables you to adapt to particular situations and meet the tightest recovery time objectives. With NAKIVO, you can instantly boot a VM directly from a backup file without performing full recovery. The Instant P2V feature helps to run a physical machine from a backup as a VMware vSphere VM. The built-in Site Recovery functionality provides advanced disaster recovery orchestration capabilities with custom workflows initiated in a few clicks.

You can use the immutable storage functionality to protect backup copies from alteration, deletion or encryption by ransomware. Features such as two-factor authentication (2FA) and role-based access control (RBAC) help to prevent unauthorized access to backups. With reliable testing and VM replication capabilities, the NAKIVO solution can ensure efficient data protection and swift recovery in any disaster scenario.

Conclusion

As we conclude our exploration into the realm of VMware backup solutions, it is evident that the right choice can profoundly impact the resilience and continuity of your virtualized infrastructure. Each solution discussed in this blog brings unique features and capabilities to the table, catering to different business requirements and preferences. You can try their free trial options and evaluate your environment to find the right fit for your business.