Features and capabilities

Backup at a hypervisor level includes the following main features and capabilities.

• Disk-level backup

  Backup of entire machines or individual disks or volumes.

  During backup, a virtual machine can be running, stopped, suspended, or switching between the three states.

• Disk-level recovery

  Recovery of entire machines, individual disks or volumes to a new or existing virtual machine.

  A virtual machine has to be stopped during the recovery to this machine. By default, the software stops the machine automatically.

• File-level recovery

  Recovery of individual files and folders to the agent's local file system (in Windows only), a network share, FTP or SFTP server.

• Cluster support

  Backup and recovery of clustered virtual machines.

• VMware vMotion/Microsoft Migration support

  Uninterrupted backup during migration of the backed-up machine. A backup plan is executed no matter which host the machine is running on.

• Simultaneous backups of virtual machines

  An agent can simultaneously back up as many as 10 virtual machines. The exact number is defined by the user.

• Incremental conversion to a virtual machine

  An agent can convert a disk-level backup to a virtual machine of the corresponding type: VMware ESX(i) or Microsoft Hyper-V. Conversion of an incremental backup updates the machine instead of creating it from scratch.

• Flexible configuration of the agents to handle one or multiple ESX(i) servers

  Applies to VMware vSphere only

  Protect your virtual environment with as many agents as you want, from one agent for all hosts to one agent for each machine. The management server evenly distributes virtual machines among the agents. Or, you can bind the agents with the machines manually.

• Off-load backup with Agent for VMware (Windows)

  Applies to VMware vSphere only

  A Windows version of Agent for VMware enables you to off-load backups from an ESX(i) host.

• Automatic agent deployment

  Applies to VMware vSphere only

  Just include virtual machines in a backup plan. The agents will be deployed and configured in the background if you allowed this when configuring integration with the vCenter Server.

• Backup to a locally attached storage

  Applies to VMware vSphere only

  Add a dedicated virtual disk to Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance) and do backups directly to this storage, omitting LAN.

• Support for Changed Block Tracking (CBT)

  Applies to VMware ESX(i) 4.0 and later

  Perform faster incremental and differential backups of ESX(i) virtual machines by using the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) feature of ESX(i).

• Support for UEFI-based virtual machines

  Applies to VMware ESXi 5 only

  Back up and recover virtual machines that use Unified Extensible Hardware Interface (UEFI). Convert a UEFI-based physical machine to a virtual machine that uses the same boot firmware.

• Support for VM templates

  Back up and recover virtual machine templates in the same way as normal ESX(i) virtual machines.