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Virtual Machine Backup Software Solutions from Bacula Systems

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Virtual Machine Backup Software Solutions Without Data Volume Price Traps.

Bacula Systems’ virtual machine backup software brings you backup and replication for hypervisor environments of any size. This virtual machine backup solution also provides a variety of fast and flexible recovery options, including entire virtual machines (VMs) and application items. Our software offers further performance and efficiency gains via Global Endpoint Deduplication, and a range of other specific controls. Bacula Systems offers the most comprehensive VM hypervisor support in the industry, providing you with a virtual machine backup solution choice that has a far wider range than any its competitors. This includes Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix, Red Hat Virtualization, KVM, Xen, Proxmox and Azure VM.

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Backup and restore of Hyper-V virtual machines at block level is supported with full level backups using the VSS API. When used with the Global Endpoint Deduplication and the ‘bothsides” FileSet option, the amount of data transfer and storage use is minimized, usually to a great extent. Single File Recovery, and Differential and Incremental level backup are available.

VMware backup and recovery for ESXi hosts using vSphere. This native integration means that the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology from VMware ensures only blocks that have changed since the initial Full, and/or the last Incremental or Differential backup are sent to the current Incremental or Differential backup stream to reduce network load and deliver more efficient backups. Bare metal recovery is also included.

VMware Instant File-Level Recovery. So Quick. So Easy.

Bacula Enterprise’s Single File Restore for VMware comes with industry-leading speed and convenience. Finding and restoring single files is now so fast and easy, you need to see it to believe it. From entire physical environments to virtual machines, entire servers, applications, single files and folders or granular application objects, Bacula Enterprise together with the VMware virtual machine backup software brings backup and data recovery to large data centers with industry leading cost efficiency. Find out what customers say about Bacula’s performance with VMware here.

When you have to restore an important file that has become corrupted or lost, and it was backed up to a virtual machine, Bacula Enterprise’s Single File Restore for virtual machines becomes particularly useful. It means you can avoid restoring a complete virtual machine – and save a lot of time. Often, recovery situations only actually call for single files to be restored from the backup. In these instances, the time-saving is huge – because you simply recover the individual files required. See the “Comparative Look at VMware-focused Backup Tools” page to find out more regarding Bacula’s clear advantages against its competitors.

Perform Single File Restore From a Large Range of Virtual Machines and Servers

Bacula Enterprise does File Level Restores (FLR) for all Virtual Machines that run File Systems and Guest OS’s that are supported by VMware. VMware Single File Restore by Bacula is compatible with an exhaustive system-range, including Windows, Linux, LVM support, EXT4, EXT3, and XFS, Windows FAT, NTFS, multidrive – and much more. Full, Incremental and Differential backup are each supported.

Backup and restore of KVM virtual machines at file level via the libvirt KVM virtual machine management interface. KVM snapshot and incremental VM backup. Virtual machine backup of KVM hypervisor also works when virtual machines are in the running mode.

Exploit Bacula’s special capabilities for Proxmox backup and restore.

Snapshot-based online backup of any Proxmox VM including QEMU and LXC Guests
QEMU Incremental backup
Full image-level Proxmox backup
Restore complete virtual machine image to original or alternate Proxmox hypervisor
Restore QEMU VM archive (.vma) to alternate directory
Restore LXC VM archive (.tar) and configuration to alternate directory

Aligned Volume Deduplication For VM Backup

Allows you to benefit from built-in deduplication features designed in filesystems like ZFS, and others that support fixed-block deduplication. Bacula’s Aligned Volume Deduplication technology offers an alternate (additional) Volume format that is aligned on specific block boundaries. This allows an underlying filesystem to efficiently deduplicate the Bacula Enterprise Deduplication Optimized Volume format. Aligned Volume Format Deduplication is an effective solution for ZFS deduplication, and is also supported with Netapp data ONTAP 8.0.1 and higher. It allows you to backup hypervisors faster and lower storage space.

Enjoy Interface Flexibility in our Virtual Machine Backup

Control virtual machine backup the way you want. Both text interface, and/or BWeb Management Suite are perfect ways to exploit the power of our virtual machine backup solution. This means you are completely enabled to use either customized scripts, or go even more quickly with an easy, informative GUI interface. You can mix and match these interfaces to suit your personal needs.

Bacula has a specific virtual machine backup solution for Xen. Backup Citrix XenServer virtual machine with Bacula Enterprise to automate, speed up and make Xen data recovery much easier. The Xen module delivers Differential and Incremental backup levels.

Snapshot-based online backup of any guest VM
Incremental and Differential backup levels
Single File Restore
VSS-based guest snapshots for quiescing VSS-based applications
Full image-level backup
Advanced deduplication performance
Ability to restore complete virtual machine image
Supports restore of old backup formats
Ability to restore to alternate directory
Full restore job logs

Further Virtual Machine Backup Software Performance Acceleration with Global Endpoint Deduplication

Global Endpoint Deduplication is an industry-leading technology that analyzes data at the block level, then stores only new blocks and uses references in Bacula volumes to blocks that are stored in the Deduplication engine. This not only saves network bandwidth usage during virtual server backup, but also storage space, which it achieves by only sending a File Daemon’s unknown blocks to the Storage Daemon. It makes backup of a virtual machine more sensitive to your hardware costs.

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Red Hat Virtualization Agentless VM Backup and Recovery

This module is designed to increase flexibility, efficiency and reduce costs for users of Red Hat Virtualization. It typically renders a lower total cost of ownership year over year when compared to other virtual machine backup and recovery solutions, and its functionality is unique in the industry, providing the following benefits:

Agentless VM backup of the Red Hat Virtualization environment
Full image-level backup of the Red Hat Virtualization environment
Incremental and Differential backup levels
Single File Recovery
Completely agnostic to storage back-end
Transparent quiescing and snapshot creation. RHV snapshot integration to create a snapshop to back up, and delete this snapshot when backup finishes (when the module finishes its work, or when the next backup is initiated).
Restore flexibility: to the same or different cluster/storage, existing or new virtual instances
Configuration of restored virtual machines on the fly, and option to restore to plain files for further processing
Disk exclusion. To control backup granularity and capacity requirements. Administrators can set up a general, automated backup, for big sets of VMs and can choose not to backup specific storage destinations. Users can retain customized configuration to simplify administration tasks.

VM exclusion offers similar benefits as above, but for VMs.
Selection of VMs to backup by tags, regular expression matching on name, per cluster, or per Storage Domain
Backup of virtual machines in a “running”, “paused” or “shut off” state
Optional password obfuscation
Failed backup controls:
- Find and remove previous failed backups / snapshots with every execution.
- Backup cancellation and connection loss controls to try to remove snapshots or clones of current backup

Bacula offers Nutanix users all the benefits of its Nutanix AHV backup module. Now you can easily protect all your Nutanix data and applications, along with the rest of your IT environment. Even if you have a very complicated one! Bacula has one of – if not the – broadest data protection integration in the industry. Here are the main features of Bacula’s Nutanix module:

Agentless deployment
Snapshot-based backup/restore
Support for any kind of guest VM
Hot copy: Online VMs supported (no need to shutdown)
Full, Incremental and Differential levels
Fast block level image backup through NDFS
Restore complete VM images
Restore network interfaces
Remote interactive snapshot deletion tool included

Azure VM

Using Bacula, you can back up and recover Azure VM’s – and the data and apps within them. All in the Cloud! Here’s what you get:

Block level image backup, based on online Snapshot of any guest VM.
Full Backups
Ability to restore complete virtual machine image

With Bacula, you can choose between two possible approaches: guest backup with File Daemon install or image-level backup with Bacula’s Azure VM module.

Do you care about security? Bacula’s unique architecture brings especially high levels of security and trustworthiness over other solutions, as well as cutting edge intrusion-detection tools. Its extreme customizability means it molds into your special security and compliance needs to make your infrastructure even more secure. Just ask our military and defense customers.

Get in touch now to talk to our experts on how our many different, high performance VM Modules can help make your life easier.

Further help on virtual machine backup:

How to backup virtual machines with Bacula Enterprise? The detailed technical guide from Bacula Systems.
Do you backup hypervisors with databases? Take a look at our database backup solutions.

Bacula Enterprise supports 25+ OSes which can be installed into virtual server backup software. See our most often Windows server backup and Linux server backup.
Bacula Enterprise supports bare metal backup and restore for Windows and Linux. This can be useful while backing up and restoring your virtual server quickly in the event of disaster.