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Top 10 VM backup tools for VMware and Hyper-V
Admins who rely on VMware and Hyper-V workloads might have trouble choosing the right backup tool for their VMs. Admins can use this article to better inform their purchasing decisions.
When it comes to VM backups, administrators' biggest challenge might be deciding between different backup products, such as Veeam's Backup and Replication, Altaro's VM Backup and Cohesity's DataProtect. Admins must understand the benefits and use cases of VM backup tools, such as instant recovery capabilities and public cloud support, prior to adoption to ensure successful VM management.
There are several VM backup tools available on the IT market, ranging from the mainstream to the obscure. Here are 10 primary tools for backing up virtualized environments, all of which support both VMware and Hyper-V.
1. Veeam Backup and Replication
Veeam Backup and Replication is one of the most feature-rich backup tools available and is known for its instant recovery and virtual lab features. Veeam recently introduced its Veeam Cloud Mobility feature, which enables admins to migrate on-premises or cloud-based workload to AWS, Azure or Azure Stack in two steps.
2. Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is a continuous data protection tool for VMware and Hyper-V. The software lets admins store backups on a wide variety of media types or write backups to the public cloud. The offering includes native support for multiple public clouds and features a WAN accelerator. It also concurrently performs VM backups, which decreases the amount of time required to back up an organization's data.
3. Cohesity DataProtect
Cohesity DataProtect protects VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix-based workloads. The company is best known for its use of hyper-converged infrastructure appliances. These appliances host resources directly on the backup server to have almost instant VM recovery. Cohesity is known for a simplified user interface, which makes backup creation and restoration a more intuitive process.
4. Vembu BDR Suite
Vembu BDR Suite is a continuous data protection tool that delivers recovery time objectives of less than 15 minutes and extensive data recoverability. The company uses a three-tier backup verification process that performs boot, mount and data integrity tests. In addition, admins can replicate Vembu backups to the Vembu cloud, a public cloud or to a remote data center.
5. SolarWinds Backup
SolarWinds Backup provides backup capabilities for Hyper-V and VMware, as well as several popular applications. SolarWinds Backup runs and stores backups in the cloud. However, admins can opt to create a local copy of their data. Because SolarWinds' cloud is the primary data storage location, the software includes a web-based accelerator that reduces the transfer data time.
6. Acronis Cyber Backup
Acronis Cyber Backup supports a wide variety of virtualization software including VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, Proxmox and Virtuozzo. Acronis provides features such as instant recovery and storage area network-based snapshot storage, but its most useful feature may be its ability to migrate VMs between different hypervisors. The software can also perform physical to virtual and virtual to physical conversions.
7. Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery
Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery has some unique data sharing and replication features. It enables endpoint users to protect and recover their own resources and even share data with other users.
The software can also replicate data to secondary locations and use machine learning to optimize performance. Oftentimes, backup products require admins to purchase add-on licenses to protect each resource type. But Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery provides full support for all file systems, applications and virtual software.
8. NovaStor Enterprise Backup
NovaStor Enterprise Backup is a highly scalable backup tool that can protect thousands of servers and petabytes of data. NovaStor designed the software around a distributed architecture that can achieve a sustained data throughput rate of 6.5 TB per hour. Its distributed architecture also enables NovaStor Enterprise Backup to be fault tolerant.
9. Iperius Backup
Iperius Backup is an agentless, lightweight backup tool for VMware and Hyper-V and is only 30 MB in size. In addition, Iperius Backup is budget-friendly with a single license that lets admins back up an unlimited number of VMs. Though Iperius Backup is not as feature-rich as some of the other products on the market, the software supports both VM-level and file-level recovery. It also let admins restore VMs to different hosts.
10. Rubrik Data Protection
Rubrik Data Protection provides backup and instant recovery capabilities for VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix VMs. One of Rubrik's unique features is its policy engine, which makes it possible to define and automate service-level agreement compliance with a few clicks. Rubrik Data Protection is also known for its search engine, which makes it easy to locate protected resources, regardless of whether they reside on premises or in the cloud.
