Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ 11 Virtual Edition

Overview

Get virtualization enabled with Acronis Backup & Recovery 11, the only solution that seamlessly integrates disaster recovery and data protection for your physical, virtual and cloud.

Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ 11 Virtual Edition license allows Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 to lead the way in server consolidation and disaster recovery accelerating your virtualization initiatives using agent-less backup combined with patented disk imaging technology; and it does all of this in a very simple feature-rich solution. It may be used separately or work together with other Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 products: all managed from the same console, with the same instruments.

Benefit form virtualization! With Acronis, going virtual is a breeze. Place as many virtual machines on a physical host as you need and, with a single low-priced license, Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition supports an unlimited number of migrations to and from the host. You can place an agent into the virtual machine and manage it exactly as you would manage a physical machine. And / or use a single host-based agent for VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V to manage all virtual machines on a host at once to simplify administration and reduce your overhead costs!

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition supports all major virtualization platforms:

• VMware vSphere / ESX / ESXi
• VMware^® vCloud^™ Director
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Red Hat^® Enterprise Virtualization
• Citrix XenServer
• KVM
• Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal

For disaster recovery and data protection for virtualized environments:

• Deploys in minutes
• One license allows backup and recovery of unlimited number of VMs on a host
• No agent required for VMware vSphere/ESX/ESXi and Hyper-V virtual machines
• Managed from a centralized console, together with physical machines
• Delivers the fastest possible recovery times with Acronis^® Instant Restore^™
• Recovers to any hardware or hypervisor or platform you choose, for the ultimate in recovery flexibility

For faster Migrations and Server Consolidation:

• Rapid migration of physical servers into virtual machines (P2V)
• Moves virtual machines among all major hypervisors quickly and, seamlessly (V2V)
• Rapid restoration or migration of virtual servers into physical servers (V2P)
• Includes built in and unlimited P2V, V2P or V2V migration to or from the host

In addition, Acronis offers options that can be used to further enhance the functionality of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition:

• Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ 11 Deduplication option enhances the benefits of disk-to-disk virtual machines backup by reducing the amount of redundant data that is backed up, saving on storage costs and optimizing network traffic.
• Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ Online integrates with the product to enable reliable off-site storage of the backups in the cloud. One console seamlessly manages all of your backups and recovery efforts regardless of the data's actual location.

Features

• One solution for physical, virtual and cloud

  Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 allows centralized management of physical and virtual machines from the same console, with the same backup plans, and with the same instruments. Avoid a need to manage various poorly integrated solutions for different environments.

• Centralized management

  Manage backup and recovery of you virtual machines, as well as physical machines from a single place, with support of machine grouping – static or dynamic, centralized rule-based backup plans, and extensive monitoring and reporting capabilities.

• One license of unlimited number of virtual machines

  One flat license fee for all virtual machines on a host, regardless of the number of CPUs allows saving on licensing cost and simplifying purchase and licenses management.

• Unlimited migrations included

  Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition license also includes unlimited number of migrate to or from a host. Virtualize, migrate between different hypervisors or move critical servers back to physical flexibly - whenever it is required; and with minimum downtime.

• Agent-less backup and recovery

  The single agent for VMware ESX(i) or Hyper-V manages all the virtual machines on the host, cutting administration overhead substantially.

• Instant Restore

  Additionally, you can maximize availability by automating the recovery process to recover to dissimilar hardware or to a virtual machine with Acronis^® Instant Restore^™.

Full list of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 features.

VMware vSphere

Included in Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition – Agent for ESX(i) provides agent-less backup and recovery of VMware vSphere / ESX/ ESXi virtual machines.

The agent and all virtual machines are managed from the same centralized console as other agents and virtual machines. This makes Acronis Backup & recovery 11 a unique solution for holistic backup and recovery of both physical and virtual environments. Advanced backup and storage management capabilities of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 perfectly work for virtual machines as well.

Save resources and management overhead

No agents are required in a virtual machines being backed up or recovered, thus freeing resources and simplifying management. Instead special Agent for ESX(i) may manage backup and recovery of as many virtual machines as required, even on multiple hosts. Should additional capacity be required – more agents may be easily added and Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 will automatically balance load between them.

Speed up

One agent may backup up to 10 virtual machines at the same time – increasing overall backup speed and reducing backup time.

During backup Agent for ESX(i) automatically attaches snapshots of virtual disks and reads data directly, reducing load on host’s TCP/IP stack and gaining superior performance. Combined with ability to use ESX(i) storage as backup destination, this allows to route data traffic though a dedicated storage network instead of LAN.

Minimize impact on productivity

Agent for ESX(i) can be deployed on ESX(i) host itself as virtual appliance or installed on a Windows machines to offload processing from the hosts.

Also the agent may backup virtual disks directly from SAN, freeing ESX(i) hosts resources and removing backup traffic from LAN.

Get both data protection and disaster recovery with single-pass backup

Individual file or folder may be recovered from virtual machine backup. Such backup may even be mounted as a disk in read-only or read-write mode or browsed with Windows Explorer.

Moreover, the catalog with search capability allows you to easily find a required version of backup or file across all locations.

Gain flexibility and unity between virtual and physical

Thanks to the unified platform, Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 store backups of physical and virtual machines in the same format allowing images of either of those to be easily recovered to physical or virtual machines, independently on hardware.

VMware vMotion and VMware High Availability support

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 fully supports VMware vMotion and VMware High Availability, ensuring that virtual machines continue to be backed up with the same settings even if they are moved.

Hyper-V

Included in Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition – Agent for Hyper-V proved agent-less backup and recovery of Microsoft Hyper-V machines.

The agent and all virtual machines are managed from the same centralized console as other agents and virtual machines. This makes Acronis Backup & recovery 11 a unique solution for holistic backup and recovery of both physical and virtual environments. Advanced backup and storage management capabilities of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 perfectly work for virtual machines as well.

Save resources and management overhead

No agents are required in a virtual machines being backed up or recovered, thus freeing resources and simplifying management. Instead special Agent for Hyper-V is installed on a Hyper-V host and may manage backup and recovery of as many virtual machines as required

Speed up

One agent may backup several virtual machines at the same time – increasing overall backup speed and reducing backup time.

Get both data protection and disaster recovery with single-pass backup

Individual file or folder may be recovered from virtual machine backup. Such backup may even be mounted as a disk in read-only or read-write mode or browsed with Windows Explorer.

Moreover, the catalog with search capability allows easily fined a required version of backup or file across all locations.

Gain flexibility and unity between virtual and physical

Thanks to the unified platform, Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 store backups of physical and virtual machines in the same format allowing images of either of those to be easily recovered to physical or virtual machines, independently on hardware.

Support for Hyper-V clusters

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 fully supports Hyper-V Clustered Virtual Machines, including those on Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV). It ensures that virtual machines continue to be backed up with the same settings even if they are moved.

Components

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition includes following components:

• Agent for ESX(i)
  Agent-less backup of VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi machines.
• Agent for Hyper-V
  Agent-less backup of Microsoft Hyper-V machines.
• Agent for Windows
  Alternatively to agent-less backup – install agent in Windows virtual machine to backup and recovery the machine.
• Agent for Linux
  Alternatively to agent-less backup – install agent in Linux virtual machine to backup and recovery the machine.
• Bootable Media
  Alternatively for agent-less restore or of physical machines – create CD, DVD or USB flash drive to boot machine from in a case of disaster and perform bare metal recovery.
• Management Console
  Remotely manage all agents; and other components
• Management Server
  Single point of centralized management. Controls and monitors backup across all machines, manages storage nodes, generates alerts and reports.
• Storage Node
  Managed backups and facilitates de-duplication.
• PXE Server
  Allows booting machines from the network to bootable environment for remote restore.
• Acronis Universal Restore
  Restore machine, Windows or Linux, to dissimilar hardware or hypervisors.

Following components are available as add-ons:

• Acronis Backup and Recovery 11 Deduplication
  Reduce storage requirements and network traffic by backing up only unique blocks of data
• Acronis Backup & Recovery Online
  Increase reliability by storing backups in cloud-based storage in addition to local.

For virtual environments

Legend:
- supported
- add-on required

	Advanced Server (for comparison)	Virtual Edition	Online for Virtual Machines
Backup to disk / network share
Backup to tape and tape libraries
Backup to Acronis Online Storage
Remote and centralized management
Backup Catalog and Search
Restore to Dissimilar Hardware or VM
Deduplication
VMs per host included in one license	4	Unlimited	Unlimited
Backup and recover virtual machines with Agent for Windows or Linux
Agentless backup for VMware
Agentless backup for Hyper-V
Unlimited P2V, V2P and V2V migrations

Products Documentation

• Brochure (0.8 MB, PDF)
• FAQ (0.2 MB, PDF)
• Web Help 
• Backing Up Virtual Machines (0.7 MB, PDF)
• User Guide (4.3 MB, PDF)
• Installation Guide (0.9 MB, PDF)
• Upgrade Guide (0.5 MB, PDF)
• Command-Line Reference (1.4 MB, PDF)
• Active Directory Backup (0.1 MB, PDF)

Use Cases

• Data protection for workstation and laptop fleet 1.2 MB
• Data retention for compliance 1.2 MB
• Disaster recovery and data protection in a hybrid environment 1.0 MB
• Disaster recovery imaging for servers 1.1 MB
• E-mail recovery 0.9 MB
• Online remote office, branch office (robo) backup 1.4 MB
• Online data protection 0.8 MB
• Server consolidation 1.4 MB
• Storage optimisation using deduplication 1.3 MB
• Virtual server disaster recovery 4.3 MB

Case Studies

• Hudson News^® to Virtualize its Line-of-Business Applications Using Acronis^® Software
  Industry: consumer retail/wholesale
• NYK Logistics shifts to a higher gear with Acronis
  Industry: legal services
• Rush Memorial Hospital protects medical records with Acronis^® software
  Industry: medical/health services

Other resources

• Case Studies
• Customer Testimonials
• Awards and Reviews
• Knowledge Base
• Acronis forums

Useful tools

Deduplication ROI Calculator	Disaster Recovery ROI Calculator
Launch in pop-up	Launch in pop-up

Purchase Online

This product is available as instant electronic delivery upon purchase.
You can also access your product download later by logging into your account.

Universal Restore

What happens when a system’s hardware fails or needs to be retired? How do you move the valuable applications and data to a new system or hardware after disaster strikes? How do you quickly restore a system after the hardware has changed?

Acronis solves this common issue with Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ 11 Universal Restore^™, a fully integrated module that restores servers or workstations to different hardware or to a virtual machine, providing highly flexible disaster recovery and migration options.

The Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Universal Restore module prepares you for even the most unforeseen events without requiring administrators to purchase and maintain identical spare machines.

The process begins when Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is used to create a transportable image that disassociates the data from the old machine’s underlying hardware. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Universal Restore loads in the new hardware’s own drivers so that the image from the previous hardware platform will allow the machine to be flawlessly restored to a different hardware platform, complete with operating system, applications, data and all previous settings. Recovery can be implemented to an existing system, to a new system with different hardware, or to a virtual machine, in minutes, by following these steps:

• Boot your replacement system with Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 bootable media you have created and select ‘Recovery’ in the menu.
• Select the image to restore.
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Universal Restore then initiates the restore process, detects the hardware and installs the appropriate drivers for Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL).
• The result is a perfectly functioning system on a new hardware platform.

Top Features

• Recover — Recover a failed system to different hardware or to virtual machines in minutes after unforeseen events.
• Migrate — Complete physical-virtual, virtual-physical, physical-physical, or virtual-virtual migrations for system recovery, testing, and other purposes.
• Fix – load new hardware drivers and replace HAL to make system bootable after replacing hardware such as motherboard or storage controller or moving HDD to another machine.
• Clone and deploy — Clone and deploy operating systems with complete hardware independence

Deduplication

The Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ 11 Deduplication option offers you affordable block-level software deduplication capability for your workstations and servers, helping you maximize the use of your storage infrastructure while saving costs and increasing capacity.

With Acronis deduplication, cut data-storage requirements up to 90% by eliminating replicas of the same file or block on either the source or target. If data already exists on the storage node, then only a link is created to associate the data with the backup client.

Both file and disk backups can benefit from deduplication, including compatibility with bare-metal recovery and recovery to dissimilar hardware with Acronis^® Universal Restore™.

The Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Deduplication module is fully integrated with all versions of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 and is enabled by the Storage Node.

Save costs and resources

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Deduplication brings storage-efficient backup and recovery to organizations of all sizes, helping you reduce costs in four ways:

• Priced per machine, rather than by storage capacity or number of CPUs
• Reduces the volume of disk storage needed for backups
• Increases the number of backups you can save within existing data storage
• Frees network data-transmission bandwidth and optimizes data-transfer speeds

Key benefits

• Lower overall cost of storage
  By eliminating redundant data backup, you can save on storage space and ultimately floor space and operation costs by managing fewer disks.
• Promotes a "greener" IT operations
  Deduplicated data is more environmentally efficient because it reduces the amount of electricity consumed and equipment needed to perform backups.
• Faster recoveries
  By storing more backups on a local disk, instead of slow tapes or other media, you benefit from faster recovery times as well as greater cost-saving potential.
• Simpler compliance
  Because government and corporate requirements generate massive amounts of data, deduplication reduces the cost of maintaining it and therefore helps you achieve compliance more efficiently.
• Rapid return on investment
  Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Deduplication pays for itself quickly while providing you with protection, availability and peace of mind.

Key features

• Fully integrated with Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ 11
  Because the deduplication functionality with backup for servers and workstations is already integrated into the solution, a machine failure won’t force you or your administrator to carry out a time-consuming rebuild before regaining access to deduplicated data. Acronis integration gives you full recovery in minutes rather than hours or days. Compare that with offerings from other vendors whose deduplication products are incompatible with their disaster recovery solutions and can result in a system failure that makes deduplicated files inaccessible for hours, or even days.
• Multi-type backups
  Deduplication can be applied to both disk and file backups, including full, incremental or differential.
• Flexible costs
  Some companies price their deduplication products based on the amount of data that is deduplicated, making it difficult to gauge the total cost of ownership. Pricing for Acronis^® Backup & Recovery^™ 11 Deduplication is per protected machine, offering a flexible cost adapted to both large and small organizations.
• Seamless hardware compatibility
  As a software-only solution, Acronis works with generally available storage hardware, so it bypasses the need for costly proprietary hardware.
• Easy to use
  Acronis deduplication functions are carefully designed to make operation simple. Activating them is as easy as ticking a checkbox in the vault configuration.
• Highly secure
  Stored deduplicated data needs special protection so it can’t be compromised. Acronis stores deduplication components separately, with special safeguards to prevent direct deletions of multi-instance data. You can also encrypt deduplicated data and limit vault access only to those with passwords.
• Source or target deduplication
  Choose where the deduplication process is done: at either the source machine or Storage Node.