Another product to mention designed to protect virtual environments is Altaro VM Backup that offers a backup solution where the simplicity is the strong point.
As guide line, the choice for the most suitable backup solution for your environment depends on different factors, such as size, number of VMs, virtual infrastructure type and so on.
Blog Series
Nakivo Backup & Replication
Altaro VM Backup
Micro Focus VM Explorer (former Trilead, HPE)
Vembu VMBackup
Veeam Backup & Replication
Altaro VM Backup
Currently available as version 7.5, Altaro VM Backup is an affordable, high performance backup solution suitable for small and mid-market environments and supports both VMware and Hyper-V virtual platforms. The software is available for Windows OS only and the installation requires only few clicks without the need of software dependencies, such as MS-SQL.
The application is easy to use and the management is done through an intuitive UI making the backup strategy easy to implement. It's also possible to monitor and manage all Altaro VM Backup installations from a single cloud console using the Altaro VM Backup Cloud Management Console.
License and available editions
The product is licensed per physical host with unlimited sockets/CPUs and includes first year of updates and support.
Altaro VM Backup is available in three editions:
- Standard – you can backup up to 5 VMs per host.
- Pro – an unlimited number of VMs per host can be backed up and supports the Exchange item restore, Deduplication and Boot from Backup. Version Pro supports also clusters and vCenter.
- Enterprise – all features are available with the addition of the Cloud Management Console and the Cloud Backup to Azure features.
Altaro includes a Free edition and allows the backup of 2 VMs per host. To test the application, Altaro VM Backup is available as 30-day trial.
You can find a detailed pricing in the Altaro's website.
Backup features
Using the snapshot technology, Altaro performs an image-based backup where all VM backups are forever incrementals and uses the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology to identify and transfer only changed data to the repository. Backup storage requirements are drastically reduced with the Augmented Inline Deduplication technology, a proprietary solution to optimize data written to the storage that saves space speeding up backups.
VM Backup performs application consistent backups of your VMs (application-aware) using the guest VSS services and all VSS Writers running inside the Guest VM. For products such as Exchange and MS SQL when the backup has completed successfully, the application performs also the task of truncating transaction logs.
Boot from Backup
Altaro includes the Boot from Backup feature that allows to boot a VM directly from backup location without restoring the full backup first. The product also support the granular restore of VMs, files and Exchange items.
Copy backups Offsite and to Cloud
To be compliant with the backup rule 3-2-1, backups can be sent offsite or to an Azure Block Blob storage account through the Backup Copy jobs. The WAN Accelerator component can be used to speed up data transfer over slow WAN.
Replication
To quickly recover mission critical VMs, VMs can be copied to an offsite location for disaster recovery protection or to an offsite storage through the Internet connection, optimized through the WAN Acceleration to speed up transfers, or by enabling drive swap rotation on selected drives.
Test backups
To ensure recoverable VMs from backups avoiding risks of damaged backups, verifying the backups is an essential part of the backup stratey. Using the Test & Verify Backup feature, there are two ways to verify automatically the integrity of your backup data:
- Verify Backup Folders
- Perform Full Test Restore
To ensure backups are healthy, the application offers a cool feature called Backup Health Monitor that proactively monitors the health of your backup storage, detecting possible blocks corruption and automatically repairs as part of the next backup job.
A complete guide for the installation and configuration of Altaro VM Backup product can be found in this article.
Website: https://www.altaro.com
