Best Backup and Recovery for VMware vSphere®
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 is the fastest, easiest and most complete solution to protect your VMware vSphere environment.
- faster to install
- faster to start backup
- Restore 100 times faster than before with vmFlashBack
New features in vmProtect 8
- vmFlashBack /incremental restore
- Staging /multi-destination backup
- Full integration into vCenter
- Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 Support
Most Complete
Acronis vmProtect 8 is the only solution that enables complete protection of VMware environments. It supports recovery of entire virtual machines; extracts individual files and Exchange items; and recovers entire ESXi servers, including binaries, configuration and VMs to a bare metal machine.
Any Destinations
Acronis vmProtect 8 offers the widest selection of backup destinations, including local disk, FTP, network shares, ESX(i) datastore, and the cloud to optimize storage.
Best Performance
Powered by Acronis' award-winning technology, Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 is the fastest way to backup and recover VMware virtual machines. Agentless backup with VMware API for Data Protection (VADP), Changed Block Tracking (CBT), hot-plug and direct SAN access makes backup and recovery fast and efficient.
New vmFlashBack technology provides near- instantaneous recovery, bringing virtual servers back to life 100 times faster than before.
Easy to Use
Manage Acronis vmProtect 8 from VMware® vCenter™ or an intuitive Web interface to manage backup and recovery using supported browsers.
Acronis vmProtect 8 is so easy to use you can quickly install, configure and start backing up your VMs in just minutes – reducing your operational and maintenance costs.
Use the Wizard to choose the best product for your needs:
- To backup a single VMware virtualization host, click here
- To backup multiple hosts or your whole IT infrastructure (servers and workstations), click here
Fastest, Easiest and Most Complete Backup and Replication for vSphere
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 is built specifically for VMware vSphere®, and provides all the features you need in an easy-to-use solution that can be deployed in minutes so you can quickly begin backing up your vSphere environment.
Easy to Deploy
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 can be installed and configured in minutes. You can install Acronis vmProtect 8 on a machine running Microsoft® Windows® or deploy it directly to a VMware ESX(i) host as a self-contained virtual appliance.
Efficient and Secure Backups
Agentless, always-incremental backup with compression and deduplication guarantees the fastest backup possible while saving on storage and traffic.
Industry-standard 256-bit AES encryption secures data in your backups, and built-in backup validation verifies that backups are not corrupted to guarantee successful recovery. An automatically generated disaster recovery plan documents the steps to recover in case disaster strikes.
Backups can be automatically stored in multiple locations for additional reliability. With an optional Acronis vmProtect Online subscription, your backups can be stored or copied offsite in the cloud at a secure datacenter.
Rapid Recovery of Exactly What You Need
Recover an entire VMware® ESXi™ host, specific virtual machines or files. You can also recover an entire Microsoft Exchange database or specific items such as individual mailboxes, emails and contacts. New, state-of-the-art vmFlashBack technology brings your virtual servers back to life 100 times faster than before. For even faster recovery, simply run the VM from its backup or start the VM created by replication.
vCenter Integration and Intuitive Web Interface
Perform backup and recovery tasks from the VMware® vCenter™ interface you're already using to manage your virtual environment, or use Acronis vmProtect 8's intuitive Web interface. With practically zero learning curve, you can quickly start performing backup and recovery tasks for your VMs, even from a mobile device.
Unlimited P2V/V2V migrations
Included at no additional cost, unlimited physical-to-virtual migrations or virtual-to-virtual migrations from another hypervisor to VMware vSphere, allows you to accelerate virtualization by using award-winning Acronis imaging technology to move physical servers or virtual machines from other hypervisors to VMware vSphere.
New Features
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 is built specifically for VMware vSphere®, and provides all the features you need in an easy-to-use solution that can be deployed in minutes so you can quickly begin backing up your vSphere environment.
vmFlashBack /incremental restore
When restoring a backup over an original virtual machine, Acronis vmProtect 8 copies only blocks that have been changed, making the restore process 100 times faster than before.
Full integration into vCenter
As an alternative to Acronis vmProtect 8’s intuitive Web-based console, all backup, recovery and replication operations can be managed directly from vCenter.
Staging /multi-destination backup
This highly requested feature automatically copies allotted backups to an additional location, locally or to the cloud. This provides additional reliability, as well as simplifies the transferring of large backups over slow Internet connections.
Support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
Includes ReFS and data deduplication.
Flexible Options for Deployment
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 provides you with two options to deploy the application:
- Virtual Appliance. An Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 Virtual Appliance can be deployed directly onto the ESX or ESXi server hardware host. This method saves the cost and work associated with provisioning, configuring and maintaining a dedicated machine, or having to purchase new hardware or a Windows license.
Machine
- Windows Agent. Acronis vmProtect 8 can be installed to a Windows server (physical or virtual) and backup VMware vSphere virtual machines remotely. This method allows offloading processing from ESX/ESXi hosts to a dedicated machine.
- Acronis vmProtect 8 is priced per host CPU socket and allows backup and recovery of an unlimited number of VMs.
Optimized for VMware vSphere®
- Agentless Backup and Recovery
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 uses VMware API for Data Protection (VADP) to perform backup and recovery of virtual machines, thus requiring no agents installed in the virtual machines. This saves management costs and minimizes resource consumption.
- Change Block Tracking (CBT).
- VMware CBT technology tracks changes of a virtual machine since previous backup and makes incremental backups faster than ever.
- Always-incremental backup.
- Once a full backup is created, successor backups are always incremental, transferring and storing only those changes that have been made since the previous backup. This is achieved using a new storage format that minimizes the time required to automatically remove old backups while ensuring that all other incremental backups remain valid.
- LAN-free
- With SAN direct access (Windows Agent) or hot-plug technology (virtual appliance), Acronis vmProtect 8 reads data directly from shared storage, avoiding unnecessary load on the LAN and ESX(i) host.
- VM Snapshot Hot-plug
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 virtual appliance can mount virtual machine snapshots during backup instead of transferring data over TCP/IP network, reducing resource consumption and significantly improving backup throughput.
- VMware® vMotion™/DRS Compatibility
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 is fully compatible with VMware vMotion, Storage vMotion and DRS. Virtual machines can be moved between VMware hosts manually or automatically in order to dynamically adjust resources or recover from failure.
- Virtual Application (vApp) Support
- Virtual applications or vApps is a VMware vSphere feature that allows you to group several virtual machines serving the same application in special containers with application-specific configuration, such as start order or resource pool settings. Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 can backup and recover entire vApps including their configuration.
Run from vCenter or Use Intuitive Web UI
Acronis vmProtect 8 offers two options to access its comprehensive set of features:
- Run from VMware® vCenter™
- Use its Web Interface
Run from VMware vCenter
Perform all Acronis vmProtect 8's backup, recovery, replication and configuration tasks from vCenter, the familiar interface you're already using to manage your vSphere environment.
Web-based Interface
Alternatively, use vmProtect 8's intuitive Web-based interface to perform all backup and recovery tasks from anywhere, using any supported Web browser.
- Dashboard. Using any supported Web browser, the Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 dashboard view provides an at-a-glance, one-page overview of all backup and recovery activities and their statuses.
- Alerts. A built-in alerting system notifies you of any dangerous or potentially dangerous situations, such as task failures or low disk space, helping to ensure that backups always run.
- E-mail notifications. Email notifications can be configured to inform the administrator on task success or failure, or new alerts.
Efficient, Secure Backups
- Efficient, Secure Backups
- Unlike most competing products that simply copy virtual machine disk (.vmdk) files, Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 uses Acronis’ award-winning imaging technology analyzes file systems to backup only data blocks that are actually being used.
- Replication
- Create and incrementally updated a copy of your virtual machine onto another host. A virtual machine can be recovered by starting the virtual machine created by replication residing on the other host. This can result in even faster recovery than running the virtual machine from its backup.
- Staging /Multi-destination Backup
- Automatically copy allotted backups to an additional location, locally or to the cloud. This provides extra reliability, as well as simplifies the transfer of large backups over slow Internet connections.
- Exclude Files from a Virtual Machine Backup
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 allows you to exclude files and folders/directories from a virtual machine backup to save space and shorten backup time.
- Built-in Data Deduplication
- Included with the Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 license, deduplication reduces backup size and time by backing up only unique blocks of data.
- Simultaneous Backup
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 shrinks backup windows by backing up multiple virtual machines simultaneously.
- Compression
- Backup files can be compressed to a smaller size before copying to storage.
- 256-bit Encryption
- Backups are optionally encrypted using the industry-standard 256-bit AES algorithm.
- Backup Verification
- Backup files can be verified to ensure their consistency and recoverability. Unlike verification functions found in some competing products, Acronis vmProtect 8 verification is performed by an agent, eliminating the need to run temporary virtual machines.
- Disaster Recovery Plan
- Automatically creates documentation of the steps to recover your data.
Recover Exactly What You Need
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 enables recovery of:
- An entire VMware® ESXi™ host
- One or more virtual machines
- Microsoft Exchange databases, mailboxes, emails and other items.
- Specific files and folders.
- vmFlashBack /incremental restore
- When restoring a backup over an original virtual machine, Acronis vmProtect 8 copies only blocks that have been changed, making the restore process 100 times faster than before.
- Rapid Recovery of Virtual Machines
- Virtual machines can be recovered quickly by running the virtual machine from its backup without having to do a full restore. Recover an entire virtual machine to replace an existing virtual machine image that got corrupted, or recover as a brand new virtual machine to any ESX/ESXi host. Mount backup storage to ESX/ESXi host as a NFS share and run virtual machine directly from the backup without having to run a full restore process - this provides nearly instantaneous recovery. Changes made to the virtual machine are not lost and can be saved back to the backup image.
- ESXi Bare Metal Recovery
- Backup and recover a VMware ESXi host, including the binaries for the VMware hypervisor, configuration settings, and all virtual machines managed by the hypervisor, to the same machine or to another machine with dissimilar hardware. VMware® ESXi™ 5.0/4.1 versions are supported.
- Recover Microsoft Exchange Items
- Recover an entire Microsoft® Exchange Server database, or individual items including mailboxes, emails and contacts. Supports Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, 2007, or 2003 SP2+.
Accelerate Migration of Your Physical Servers to Virtual Machines
Unlimited Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) Migrations: Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 includes award-winning imaging technology to reliably convert physical machines or virtual machines from other hypervisors to VMware vSphere virtual machines.
How It Works
Leveraging more than a decade of experience in image backup, we designed Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 specifically for VMware vSphere® virtual servers to be the easiest to deploy, most complete backup and recovery solution.
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 uses VMware's vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) to allow agentless backup and recovery of virtual machines on one or several VMware ESX(i) hosts remotely. No agents need to be installed in your virtual machines, so you can quickly start the backup process.
Fast and Flexible Recovery
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 provides multiple recovery options:
- Recover an entire virtual machine on any ESX/ESXi host
- Recover individual files or folders for supported guest's file systems
- Recover an Microsoft® Exchange Server database, or individual items including mailboxes, emails and contacts
- Recovery entire ESXi host to a bare metal machine
When recovering over existing virtual machine, Acronis vmProtect 8 uses breakthrough vmFlashBack technology which uses Change Block Technology (CBT) to identify and recover blocks changed since the last backup. This makes the restore process 100 times faster than before.
Acronis vmProtect 8 provides an option to mount backup storage to ESX/ESXi host as NFS share and run virtual machine directly from the backup providing nearly instantaneous recovery.
Flexible Deployment
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 offers unprecedented ease and flexibility of deployment, and provides you with two options to install the application:
- Acronis vmProtect 8 Virtual Appliance runs on ESX or ESXi host and does not require any additional hardware or Microsoft® Windows® license.
- Acronis vmProtect 8 Windows Agent installs on a dedicated machine running Microsoft® Windows™, and offloads backup and recovery tasks from production ESX(i) hosts.
Intuitive and Easy to Use
RunAcronis® vmProtect™ 8 from VMware® vCenter™ and perform backup, recovery or replication from the same interface you're already using to manage your virtual machines.
Alternatively, use Acronis vmProtect 8's intuitive Web-based interface to remotely perform all tasks using any supported Web browser.
Faster, Smaller, More Efficient Backups
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 is designed to support an always-incremental approach, where older incremental backups can be removed to free-up space for new backups without requiring a resource-intensive consolidation, and the use of VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology makes incremental backups faster than ever.
For shared storage such as SAN, Acronis vmProtect 8 reads data directly though the storage network, making the backup LAN-free.
Additionally, instead of copying entire virtual disk (.vmdk) files, Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 looks inside disks and volumes to analyze file systems and takes only blocks that are actually occupied by data. This allows Acronis vmProtect 8 to create backups much faster and smaller compared to competing products.
Built-in data deduplication finds identical blocks and ensures that each of them is saved only once. Combined with compression, it reduces storage requirements and traffic, especially in environments with a large number of similar virtual machines.
Secure Verified Backups
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 automatically validates backups to ensure that all data is recoverable. Unlike competing products, it reads and verifies every block of a backup ensuring that no data is corrupt. All backups can be encrypted with an industry-standard 256 bit AES encryption.
Store Backups in the Cloud
Additionally, via an optional Acronis vmProtect Online subscription, backups can be securely stored offsite in the cloud at a datacenter managed by Acronis. You don’t need to deploy and manage this offsite infrastructure yourself.
Seamless Integration with Acronis Cloud Storage
Local backups help protect you from hardware failure or human error. But what about a larger scale disaster, such as flood or fire, when an entire site is affected, including your backups?
To avoid data loss and ensure business recoverability for this scenario, companies have traditionally utilized a common offsite backup strategy: physically shipping tapes offsite or replicating backups to another office. However, this approach requires having another office, or investing in and managing tape hardware, which can be costly.
Unlike other solutions available on the market, Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 integrates seamlessly with Acronis cloud storage.
Acronis vmProtect Online is an optional subscription that stores your virtual machine backups at highly secure offsite datacenter managed by Acronis. You don’t need to make any costly hardware investments to get started, so regardless of the size of your organization, you can quickly implement and benefit from storage in the cloud.
Acronis vmProtect Online can be used separately or in combination with an Acronis vmProtect license, enabling you to use the Web-based interface to save VM backups to local, remote or Acronis online storage.
Hypervisors
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 can backup and recover virtual machines running on:
- VMware vSphere® 5.1, 5.0, 4.1, and 4.0.
- VMware® ESX® and VMware® ESXi™ hypervisors are supported except for the free version. For more information see KB Article http://kb.acronis.com/content/36136.
- Virtual machines can run any guest operating system supported by VMware vSphere.
Bare Metal Recovery is only available for VMware ESXi, but not for VMware ESX.
Microsoft Exchange Server
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 supports Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, 2007, or 2003 SP2+.
Web Browsers
In order to connect remotely for configuration and management one of the following web browsers is required (running on any operating system supported by the browser):
- Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 7 or later
- Mozilla® Firefox 3.5 or later
- Apple® Safari® 5
- Google Chrome™ 10 or later
- Opera™ 10 or later
Operating Systems
If not installing vmProtect 8 as a Linux Virtual Appliance directly on a VMware vSphere host, it can be installed on x86 (32 bit) and x64 (64 bit) versions of:
- Microsoft® Windows Server® 2012
- Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2
- Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008
- Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 R2
- Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003
- Microsoft® Windows® 8
- Microsoft® Windows® 7
- Microsoft® Windows Vista®
- Microsoft® Windows® XP SP2+
File Systems
Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 can back up virtual machines independently on a file system. However, to be able to recover individual files or folders, the file system should be on the following:
- FAT16/32
- NTFS
- Ext2/Ext3/Ext4
Storage
- Hard disk drives and storage arrays (P-ATA (IDE), S-ATA, SCSI, iSCSI, FC)
- NAS (SMB and FTP)
- Acronis Cloud Storage
Comparison of Key Features in vmProtect 8 and Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5
| vmProtect 8 | Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 | Notes | |
| Installation / Deployment | |||
| Install on Windows |  | | |
| Install as Virtual Appliance | | | |
| Virtual Machines Supported | |||
| Agentless backup of VMware vSphere VMs | | | |
| Agent-less backup of Microsoft Hyper-V VMs | | ||
| Backup of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization / KVM VMs | | ||
| Backup of Citrix XenServer VMs | | ||
| Backup of Parallels VMs | | ||
| Backup of physical machines | | ||
| Scalability | |||
| Scalable up to | 1 - 100 VMs | Hundreds of VMs or physical machines | |
| Centralized management of multiple agents from a single console | | ||
| Automatic deployment of new virtual appliances when required | | ||
| Load Balancing of backup/recovery tasks between agents | | ||
| Management | |||
| Manage backup and recovery of VMware, Hyper-V, Red Hat, and other VMs from a single console | | ||
| Web-based management interface | | ||
| Reporting | Basic | | |
| Backup | |||
| Change Block Tracking | | | |
| Always incremental backup | | | After first full backup |
| Direct SAN access (LAN-free backup) | | | For agent-less backup |
| Encrypt backups | | | |
| Verify backups | | | |
| Backup individual files using agent installed on VM | | ||
| Microsoft Exchange Backup (single-pass with VM backup) | | ||
| Microsoft Exchange Backup (dedicated agent) | | ||
| Multi-destination and staging of backups | | | |
| Recovery | |||
| Run VM from backup without having to perform full restore | | ||
| vmFlashBack – skip recovery of unchanged blocks | | ||
| Automatically restore to a stand-by VM when backup completes | | ||
| Microsoft Exchange Items Recovery | | | |
| Migrate machines from physical to virtual (P2V) and from one hypervisor to another (V2V) | | | |
| Migrate virtual machines to physical (V2P) | | ||
| Storage | |||
| Backup to disk / network share | | | |
| Backup to cloud storage | | | Requires optional subscription from Acronis |
| Backup to tape | | ||
| Licensing | Per CPU | Per Physical Host | |
Product Documentation
- Web Help
- Data Sheet (0.2 MB, PDF)
- User Guide (3.0 MB, PDF)
- Quick Start Guide (0.1 MB, PDF)
- Compare solutions with the Taneja Lab report (1.0 MB, PDF)
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