Moving from physical to virtual, cloud or hybrid environments can save huge costs for your business. You will use less hardware and spend less time on repairs. VMware is a leader in providing virtual environments for thousands of businesses around the globe. Even back in 2016, 100% of fortune 500 hundred companies relied on VMware and over 500,000 customers managed to save billions of dollars thanks to VMware! 

Today VMware continues to be in high demand and incorporated by small, medium and large enterprises globally. However, let’s not neglect one of the most important issues for VMware customers — data protection! VMware infrastructure can be affected by user error, metadata corruption, hardware or software issues. Plus, hackers seem to find their way to the ESXi server. Several attempts have been made to compromise ESXi server with RansomExx with the goal to encrypt a virtual hard drive. Let’s go over in greater detail what VMware is, the need for VM Backup, the available VMware backup solutions and the basic steps for virtual machine backup. 

What Is VMware?

VMware is a company created in California in 2004 and acquired by Dell Technologies in 2016. VMware offers virtualization technologies — virtual machines (VMs) reside on a bare-metal hypervisor with X86 architecture. You can install a hypervisor on a data storage device referred to as an ESXi host. You can run multiple VMs on top of your hypervisor and various OSs within those VMs. Server virtualization allows you to run multiple VMs on the same physical hardware — imagine how much cost and actual space could you save! 

Why Is VMware Backup Important? 

VMware backup is important because virtualization has so many practical applications and benefits, businesses rely on virtual technologies to run their production workloads on a regular basis. A company can have huge amounts of data within VMs that run on a single piece of hardware. The whole production and success of the company depends on the overall functioning and good health of your virtual environment. On the other hand, if anything happens — power failure, hardware failure, disaster or a security threat — your whole production can slow down or even stop! Downtime or failure should never occur because it can cause financial and operational losses. To prevent any type of data loss, you need to back up your VMware infrastructure around-the-clock. Best third-party backup solutions have disaster recovery and site-failover plans that can ensure minimum downtime in case of a disruptive event. 

What Is the Top VMware Backup Software?

Multiple backup solutions today offer a full backup option for VMware infrastructures. When you choose a backup solution to support your VMware environment ensure that it has the most advanced and uptodate features and capabilities including:

• Image-based backup. Creates a point-in-time copy of a VM that captures guest OS disks, configuration files, and applications without in any way influencing the source VM. 
• Incremental backup. Uses changed tracking technology to copy only the blocks of data that have changed since the previous backup, allowing more practical and faster backups. 

• App-aware backup. Insures consistency of data across applications and databases during the backup, creating complete, reliable backups. 

• Granular recovery. Enables you to recover Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Active directory, Microsoft SQL and Oracle Database single items to the original or custom location.

• Instant recovery. Boot your data within seconds from compressed and deduplicated backups to bring your downtime to a minimum. 

• Backup verification.Test-recover your VM and obtain a report about the status of your backup to ensure a successful recovery when it’s needed. 

• Backup tiering. Allows you to store backups in secure storage locations — on premises, in the cloud or tape to ensure a reliable recovery process. 
• Policy-based backup. Enables you to backup your data to multiple locations to ensure a quick recovery under any scenario. 
• Replication. Create an identical copy of your VM and store it in a convenient location to failover if needed. 
• Automated-VM failover. Automatically resume your production environment after you fail over to a VM replica.
• Physical to virtual recovery. Recover your physical servers and workstations to VMware VMs to carry on with your operations instantly. 

When looking for a backup solution for your business, make sure that your future VMware backup software offers the above features. One of the solutions to consider is NAKIVO Backup & Replication — a leading provider of the affordable and enterprise-grade backup and replication services for VMware Vsphere. 

How to Back up a VMware Virtual Machine?

Now when we’ve talked about VMware and VMware backup software and its features, let’s go over the basic steps of VMware backup. 

A solid backup solution has a convenient user interface with a backup wizard that can guide you through the backup process of your VMs. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can backup your VMs in the following 5 steps:

• Source. Select the VMs you wish to back up. 

• Destination. Choose backup repositories for your VMware backup.

• Schedule. Set up your backup jobs manually or automatically.

• Retention. Configure retention policy for your recovery points.
• Options. Set up your jobs options in the following categories:
• Job options. Name your backup job and Enable/Disable such settings as: App-aware mode, change tracking, network acceleration, encryption, VM verification and more.
• Full backup settings. If your repository type is Incremental with full backups, you can specify how often you should run full backups and the type of a full backup: Synthetic Full or Active Full. 
• Pre and post job actions. Before your backup starts, select actions that apply to your backup job: send job run reports, truncate Exchange logs For Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SQL server. 
• Data Transfer. Select a transporter, indicate a transporter load, and configure bandwidth throttling. 
• Completing the New Backup Job Wizard for VMware. Complete your backup job. 

Conclusion 

If you are a user of a VMware-based environment, think about how to back up your VMware VMs successfully to avoid data loss during disruptive events, such as malware attacks, disasters or a system failure. Explore the best VMware backup solutions on the market that can address the needs of your organization. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an agentless, affordable and user-friendly backup solution that can protect your VMware VMs 24/7. Learn more about VMware vSphere backup by clicking here.

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