To perform an MSP VMware backup for your virtual machine, you need to have more flexibility for disaster recovery.
A backup process is a necessary element of any data center. When working virtualized resources controlled by VMware, you must have a reliable approach to backup and restore VMware virtual machines (VMs).
When looking for the right MSP VMware Backup as a subscription program, the MSP virtual machine backup needs to allow you to monitor and manage all your customers’ virtual machine backups via a central online console.
Backup should be built for MSP and provide your customers with virtual backup, recovery, and replication via an online console at a very affordable price in the industrial market.
The VMware VM backup software is performing virtual disaster recovery and backup data protection.
A definition of VMware backup
VMware backup is a methodology for stemming data failure from a virtual machine (VM) running on a VMware host server. It is crucial for ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) for virtual server environment administrators using VMware ESXi Hypervisor.
Most organizations still rely on traditional virtual machine (VM) application consistent backup and data recovery software, but there are downsides to that approach. In most IT stocks, virtual servers are initially backed up according to the physical servers, but traditional backup methods fall apart as the number of virtual servers increases.
Ensuring that your VMware VM backups are secure is crucial to protecting your system. The possibility of someone acquiring unauthorized access to any unencrypted backup leaves your MSP incredibly vulnerable.
Ensures that data is encrypted when moving and stored. To effectively secure your backups, encrypt them while still and in transit. This type of end-to-end encryption reduces vulnerability.
A physical server that can host many VMware virtual machines poses challenges that do not exist when backing up dedicated physical servers. With considerable VMware virtual machines contending for storage, processing, and network resources, those resource disputes are the No. 1 challenge on a virtual server backup – VMware VM backup.
Remember that VMware snapshots are not backups!
Treating VMware snapshots as a backup is, unfortunately, a common mistake. VM snapshots can not be used as a backup because the image disk space is dependent on the motherboard and all other previous image disks in the chain.
And now we got to the main point – to take a closer look at the best approaches for you to consider your preferred approach to perform an MSP VMware backup for your virtual machine.
Approach no.1: Dedicated VMware backup and restore solution
VMware provided a VMware Data Protection tool, which was recently recalled in 2017 that resulted in many users migrating to third-party backup solutions that support virtualized environments.
There are various VMware tools as application-aware backup process grants application-consistent backups.
It has proven to be of the backup best practices to perform an MSP VMware backup because these solutions provide:
- Backup applications for Microsoft technologies such as Exchange, Active Directory, and Microsoft SQL
- Backup and restore guest operating systems, entire VMs, or entire ESXi hosts
- Instant VM backup
- Additional backups using VMware Changed Block Tracking and Duplication to reduce storage space
Approach no.2: Backing up virtual machines as physical machines
From the user’s perspective, the virtual machine works just like a physical machine; it has a guest operating system running in isolation from other VMs. It means that regular backup procedures for non-virtualized loads are able to operate the exact way for VMware VMs.
System administrators are also able to install a backup agent and schedule backups just as they would for a regular machine. This MSP backup solution is simple, has no learning curve, and allows administrators to exclude non-essential applications or data to reduce the backup size.
However, it only protects the operating system and applications, not the VM, so there is no way to directly restore the entire virtualized environment.
Approach no.3: VMWare virtual machine-based file backups
VMware saves each VM as a VM file; it is usually a VMDK file. Correspondingly, you can back up these files to protect entire VMs in one easy step. The VMware infrastructure backup process is getting VMware VM backup jobs all over the VMware environment.
On the contrary, operating system backups can take a long time and consume significant system resources, are copying a VMDK file quickly and easily.
The backup is performed and provides resources from the ESXi server. This quick, easy method does not affect the guest operating system or applications.
Furthermore, it captures a complete MSP VM image without removing certain applications or directly restoring a specific application or file.
You can only convert the entire VMDK file, which can be large and contain irrelevant applications or data. The goal of recovery time (RTO) can be higher with backup and file-based recovery.
Conclusion
As most managed service providers (MSPs) know, backing up your vSphere servers is crucial to protecting the continuity of your organization’s critical data. All businesses worldwide should avoid any crucial data loss.
Backing up your vSphere virtual machines is critical in maintaining service availability, and backups are essential for emergency restoration activities.
In addition, considering the best MSP VMware backup approach for your virtual machine, you can help ensure that your backups are valid, secure, automated, error-free, and efficient.
