Nakivo Backup & Replication for Hyper-V gets ready for prime time

Nakivo Inc.’s latest backup and replication product offers support for VMware vSphere 6.5, Microsoft Hyper-V 2016, VMware vSphere 6.5 and Windows Server 2016 Backup along with a way to delete obsolete or orphaned backed up data in bulk with a single click.

Sergei Serdyuk, Nakivo’s director of product management, said Nakivo Backup & Replication v7 with added support for Hyper-V is currently in beta and will be generally available later in the month.

The product performs image-based backups and uses virtual machine (VM) snapshots to create backups that can be stored in a local data repository or in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Nakivo Backup & Replication v7 beta offers native backup for Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 and the R2 version. The agentless software is application-aware via Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service technology and supports Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SQL and Microsoft SharePoint. It recovers operating system files and application objects.

“We have a bulk feature and we use traffic redirection technology to speed up the data transfers,” Serdyuk said. “You can get an average of two times improvement if you use this feature in terms of the backup speeds. We will have a single product to back up Hyper-V to AWS environments.”

The Nakivo Backup & Replication v7 beta software also supports VMware vSphere 6.5, which creates VM snapshots of the backed up data and identifies the changed data by using VMware change block tracking technology. It sends data to the repository and removes the temporary snapshots.

Active Directory Integration has been added, allowing numerous users to log into the product. IT administrators can map Active Directory groups to a Nakivo software user’s roles so they can log in with their domain credentials.

“This new feature was a request by customers, mostly by enterprise customers who use Active Directory,” Serdyuk said. “It improves the company’s security, management and scalability.”

An activities tab offers a centralized view of software activity, including jobs that are running, files being stored and object recovery sessions. Protection for containers is also supported.

“In the VM infrastructure, there are a number of containers,” Serdyuk said. “Customers can protect  a particular container (such as a host or a cluster) and all current and future VMs in this container will be added to the job. In addition, customers can exclude VMs they don’t want to protect (test machines, for example).”

Nakivo Backup & Replication has also added the ability to skip swap files, a temporary location on a hard drive that stores data not used by random access memory.

“The new version automatically skips those files,” Serdyuk said. “They can become quite large.”

Version 7 of the Nakivo software does forever incremental backups, which means that after the initial full backup only the subsequently changed data is sent to the repository for more efficient backups. Backup & Replication v7 beta supports Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases running inside VMs.