VMware vSphere Backup Software | Centralize and Automate

VMware vSphere backup overview

VMware vSphere is the industry-leading enterprise virtualization platform. Like other data, virtual machine backup is an important protection measure to ensure you recover important data in time and keep business continuity.

However, the official VMware vSphere backup software VMware Data Protection (VDP) has announced the End of Availability. According to VMware, vSphere 6.5 is the last release that includes vSphere Data Protection, and the future vSphere releases no longer include it.

This means VMware has decided to exit the data protection market and focus its investments on VMware vSphere Storage APIs, handing over the task of data protection to the third-party ecosystem. As a result, customers rely on VDP will need to migrate their backup policies to another third-party backup solutions for VMware vSphere.

An efficient VMware vSphere backup software – AOMEI Cyber Backup

You may need an effective backup software for VMware vSphere to protect your virtual environment and gain the ability to quickly recover your virtual machines when needed. In this article, I will introduce an efficient VMware vSphere backup software - AOMEI Cyber Backup, which enables you to backup multiple VMs either managed by vCenter Server, or on a standalone ESXi host.

It simplifies the backup process and present the steps with intuitive GUI interface. In addition, it offers you the following benefits.

✦ Agentless Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs.
✦ Support Free ESXi: AOMEI Cyber Backup support both paid and free versions of VMware ESXi.
✦ Flexible vSphere Backup: batch backup large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server, or multiple VMs on a standalone ESXi host.
✦ Multiple Storage Destinations: backup to local drive, or network destinations like Windows share or NAS.
✦ Automated Execution: create backup schedules to automate backups daily, weekly, monthly.
✦ Email Notification: send email notification when the task is completed or abnormal.
✦ Role Assignment: allows one administrator to create sub-accounts with limited privileges.

As for VMware vSphere, AOMEI Cyber Backup supports VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions. Next, I will show you how to perform vSphere VM backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup. You can click the following button to download the free trial.

*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.

Steps to perform vSphere backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup

▶ Backup multiple VMs:

1. Bind Devices: Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, navigate to Source Device > VMware > + Add VMware Device to Add vCenter or Standalone ESXi host. And then click … > Bind Device.

2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task, and select VMware ESXi Backup as the Backup Type.

3. Set the Task Name, Device, Target, Schedule and Cleanup as needed.

• Task Name: you can change the task name or use the default name with an ordinal.
• Device: batch backup multiple VMs on vCenter or standalone host within one backup task.

• Target: select to back up to a local path, or to a network path like NAS.
• Schedule (optional): perform full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified.

• Cleanup (optional): automatically delete the old backup copies that exceed the retention period you specified.

4. Run Backup: Now you can click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately for restoring, progress checking and schedule changing.

▶ Restore VM from backup:

5. Restore from Backup: Select the backup task you want to restore, and click ... > Restore to open the wizard.

Or you can click Backup Management > History Versions. Specify a VM and select a restore point from the left list.

6. Start Restore: Choose to Restore to original location or Restore to new location. And click Start Restore to recover the virtual machine in place.

▶ Restore to new location: Create a new VM in the same or another datastore/host directly from the backup to perform out-of-spacre recovery, saves the trouble of re-configuring the new VM.

Summary

Regular VMware vSphere backup and restore is one of the most basic measures to ensure VM data security. However, if you have multiple VMs that need to be backed up and restored, using native ways may be laborious. For customers who use vSphere 6.5 or later versions, a third-party VMware vSphere backup software will be needed for replace VMware Data Protection (VDP).

In this regard, AOMEI Cyber Backup is a good alternative for VMware Data Protection. It helps you to centrally manage and automate the backup and restore of multiple VMware ESXi or Hyper-V VMs. Free yourself from the heavy workloads at an affordable price. Especially friendly to small medium-sized enterprises.

If you prefer a free vSphere backup software, you can also try the AOMEI Cyber Backup free edition.