Red Hat Virtualization has become a cornerstone platform for enterprise IT infrastructure, powering mission-critical workloads across government agencies, healthcare systems, financial institutions, and research organizations. As these environments grow in complexity and scale (up to 400 hosts per single RHV cluster), the need for sophisticated backup and recovery solutions becomes paramount.
It is important to mention that the development of RHV has stopped as of August 2020 and the product in question is only receiving maintenance updates since then – with its extended life phase updates being planned until 2026. However, there are still many environments that use it for various use cases, delaying the migration process to OpenShift container platform – the official successor of RHV.
While RHV offers robust virtualization features, protecting these environments requires specialized backup technologies that integrate natively with oVirt APIs and understand the unique characteristics of KVM-based virtualization. Ransomware threats have evolved to specifically target hypervisor layers, recognizing that compromising virtualization infrastructure provides access to dozens or hundreds of virtual machines through a single attack vector.
Enterprise RHV deployments require backup architectures that deliver more than periodic snapshots. Modern data protection strategies must provide agentless backup operations that don’t burden VM performance, support for multiple storage backends without vendor lock-in, and intelligent snapshot management that prevents storage bloat. At the same time, organizations are also facing the increasing regulatory scrutiny from GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and sector-specific compliance frameworks that demand verifiable backup procedures, encrypted data protection, immutable storage capabilities, and detailed audit trails – requirements that native hypervisor tools simply cannot fulfill.
