The Best Backup and Recovery for VMware vSphere® - No One Else is Even Close
Server virtualization benefits include lower TCO due to hardware consolidation and increased efficiency of IT Staff in deploying new applications, which enables your organization to respond more quickly to business opportunities. Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 is the best solution to protect your VMware vSphere environment.
- Faster to install
- Faster to start backup
- Faster to restore
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 introduces some important enhancements to vmProtect 6, including:
- Replication of a VM onto another ESXi host
- Management from VMware vCenter
- Microsoft Exchange Recovery
- Bare Metal Recovery of an ESXi host
- Automatic Disaster Recovery Plan
Click on the links above or view the Features and Benefits pages to learn more about how you can benefit from each of these new features.
Flexible
Choose the deployment option that best suits your needs: use a simple safe, contained Virtual Appliance or install on a server/PC running Microsoft® Windows® to offload processing from your ESX(i) servers.
Unlimited P2V migrations to VMware vSphere® at no additional cost also help accelerate your virtualization journey.
Designed for VMware
Get the most from VMware vSphere® with a backup & recovery solution designed specifically for it.
Agentless backup with VADP, Changed Block Tracking (CBT), hot-plug and direct SAN access – all this makes VMware vSphere backup and recovery fast and efficient.
Best Performance
Thanks to Acronis' award-winning technology, Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 is the fastest way to backup VMware virtual machines, with always-incremental backup providing nearly zero impact on ESX(i) servers.
You can quickly boot a VM from its backup or recover from a replica VM for even faster recovery.
Review the Taneja Group report which confirmed vmProtect's top performance metrics.
Easy to Use
Run vmProtect 7 from VMware® vCenter™ or use the intuitive web interface to manage backup and recovery whenever and wherever you are.
So easy you can quickly install, configure and start backing up your VMs in just minutes - all this reduces your operational and maintenance costs.
What are the similarities and differences between Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 and Acronis Backup & Recovery® 11 Virtual Edition?
Click here to see a side-by-side comparison
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 Versus the Competition
| Features | Acronis vmProtect 7 | Veeam Backup & Replication 6 Standard | Veeam Backup & Replication 6 Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | |||
| Agent-less backup of virtual machines | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Install app on Windows server / laptop / PC | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Deploy app as ESX(i) Virtual Appliance | Yes | ||
| Management | |||
| GUI to perform backup/recovery tasks remotely | Yes | ||
| Run from VMware vCenter | Yes | ||
| Dashboard | Yes | Yes | |
| Email Notifications and alerting | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Storage | |||
| Disk, Network Share, or NAS | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| FTP and SFTP | Yes | ||
| Cloud-based storage | Yes | ||
| Backup | |||
| Always incremental backup (after first full backup) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Change Block Tracking support | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| LAN-Free Backup | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Excluding unused blocks from VM backup | Yes | ||
| Excluding files, folders and volumes from VM backup | Yes | ||
| How often backups can be scheduled | 1 min | Near-CDP | Near-CDP |
| Automated backup verification without VM | Yes | ||
| Automated recovery verification by running a VM | Yes | ||
| Deduplication between backup sessions | Yes | ||
| 256-bit Encryption (AES 256) in transmission and at target | Yes | ||
| Recovery | |||
| Restore entire VM | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| File-level recovery from VM backup | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Instant VM recovery by running VM from backup image | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Save changes back to archive after instant VM recovery | Yes | ||
| Recover Microsoft Exchange Items | Yes | Yes | |
| Recover an entire ESXi host | Yes | ||
| Additional features | |||
| Replication | YES | Yes | Yes |
| Physical to Virtual (P2V) and Virtual to Virtual (V2V) Migration | Yes | ||
| Licensing | |||
| Per-socket license with unlimited VMs | AU$549.00 | US $599 | US $899 |
Key Features and Benefits
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 is built specifically for VMware vSphere®, and provides all the features you need in an extremely easy-to-use solution that can be deployed in minutes so you can quickly begin backing up your vSphere environment.
What's New in vmProtect 7?
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 introduces some exciting new features including:
- Replication of a Virtual Machine onto another host machine
- Manage backup & recovery from VMware® vCenter™
- Microsoft® Exchange Recovery
- Bare Metal Recovery of a VMware vSphere® ESXi host machine to dissimilar hardware
- Automatically Generated Disaster Recovery Plan
Extremely Easy to Deploy
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 can be installed and configured in minutes. Based on your preference you may choose between installing vmProtect 7 on a machine running Microsoft® Windows® or deploy it directly to a VMware ESX(i) host as a self-contained Virtual Appliance.
Optimized for VMware vSphere®
With agentless backup, Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 does not require agents to be installed in every VM - minimizing management overhead and memory consumption . Plus it reads data directly from a shared storage avoiding unnecessary load on the LAN and the ESX(i) hosts.
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 vmProtect 7's intuitive web interface. vmProtect 7 is so easy to use there is practically zero learning curve – enabling you to quickly start performing backup and recovery tasks for your VMs, even from a smart phone.
Efficient and Secure Backups
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.
Additionally with an optional Acronis vmProtect Online subscription, your backups can be stored offsite in the cloud at a secure datacenter.
Rapid Recovery of Exactly What You Need
Recover quickly by simply running the VM from its backup. For even faster recovery, simply start the VM created by Replication.
Recover an entire VMware® ESXi™ host, specific virtual machines, or even specific files. For Microsoft Exchange, recover a database, or just the individual mailboxes, emails, contacts, or other items you need.
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.
Flexible Options for Deployment
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 provides you with two options to deploy the application:
- Virtual Appliance. A purpose-built Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 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-based agent. Acronis vmProtect 7 can be installed to a Windows server (physical or virtual) and back up VMware vSphere virtual machines remotely. This method allows offloading processing from ESX/ESXi hosts to a dedicated machine.
- Per-CPU Licensing. Acronis vmProtect 7 is priced per host CPU socket and allows backup and recovery of unlimited number of VMs.
Optimized for VMware vSphere®
- Agentless backup and recovery.
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 uses VMware API for Data Protection (VADP) to perform backup and recovery of virtual machines, thus requiring no agents installed in the virtual machines, saving management cost and minimizing 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) vmProtect 7 reads data directly from a shared storage, avoiding unnecessary load on the LAN and ESX(i) host.
- VM Snapshot Hot-plug.
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 Virtual Appliance can mount virtual machine snapshots during backup instead of transferring data over TCP/IP network which reduces resource consumption and significantly improves backup throughput.
- VMware® vMotion™/DRS Compatibility.
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 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™ 7 can back up and recover entire vApps including their configuration.
Run from vCenter or Use Intuitive Web UI
Acronis vmProtect 7 offers two options to access its comprehensive set of features:
- Run from VMware® vCenter™
- Use its Web Interface
Run from VMware vCenter
Perform vmProtect 7's backup and recovery tasks from vCenter, the familiar interface you're already using to manage your vSphere environment.
Web-based Interface
Alternatively, use vmProtect7's intuitive web interface to perform all backup and recovery tasks from anywhere using any major web browser.
- Dashboard. Accessed using any major Web browser, the Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 dashboard view provides at-a-glance one-page overview of all backup and recovery activities and their statuses. This easy-to use interface minimizes your learning curve so you can immediately begin performing backup and recovery tasks for your virtual environment.
- Alerts. A built-in alerting system notifies the user of any dangerous or potentially dangerous situations such as tasks failures or low disk space helping to ensure that backups always run.
- E-mail notifications. E-mail notifications can be configured to inform the administrator on tasks success or failure or new alerts.
Efficient, Secure Backups
- Fastest and smallest backups.
- Unlike most competitors that simply copy virtual machine disk (.vmdk) files, Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 uses Acronis award-winning imaging technology to dig inside virtual machine disks and analyze file systems to only backup data blocks that are actually used.
- Exclude files from a VM backup.
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 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™ 7 license, reduces backup size and time by backing up only unique blocks of data.
- Simultaneous Backup.
- Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 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 can be 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, vmProtect 7 verification is performed by an agent and it is not necessary 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™ 7 enables recovery of:
- An entire VMware® ESXi™ host
- One or more VMs
- Microsoft Exchange databases or specific items
- Specific files and folders.
- Rapid Recovery of VMs
- Virtual Machines can be recovered quickly by simply running the VM from its backup without having to do a full restore. Recover an entire virtual machine to replace an existing VM image that got corrupted, or recover as a brand new VM 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.
- Replication:
- Create and incrementally update a copy of your VM on another host. Using replication, a virtual machine can be recovered by starting the VM created by replication residing on the other host. This can result in even faster recovery than running the VM from its backup.
- Recover Microsoft Exchange Items
- Recover directly from the VM an entire Microsoft® Exchange Server database or just the mailboxes, emails, contacts, or other items you need. Supports Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, 2007, or 2003 SP2+.
- Bare Metal Recovery:
- Backup a VMware ESXi host and recover that host, including the binaries for the VMware hypervisor, configuration settings, and all VMs managed by the hypervisor - to the same machine or to another machine with dissimilar hardware. VMware® ESXi™ v5 /4.1 versions are supported.
Accelerate Migration of Your Physical Servers to Virtual Machines
Reliable and unlimited Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migrations. Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 includes award-winning Acronis imaging technology to reliably convert physical machines or virtual machines from other hypervisors to VMware vSphere virtual machines.
How It Works
Leveraging almost a decade of experience in image backup, we designed Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 specifically for VMware vSphere® virtual servers to be the easiest to deploy, simplest to use backup and recovery solution.
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 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 backing up your VMs.
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 provides multiple recovery options:
- Recover an entire virtual machine over an existing VM or as a new VM on any ESX/ESXi host
- Mount backup storage to ESX/ESXi host as NFS share and run virtual machine directly from the backup providing nearly instantaneous recovery
- Recover individual files or folders for supported guest's file systems
- Recover an entire Microsoft® Exchange Server database, or just the mailboxes, emails, contacts, or other items you need
- Bare metal recovery of ESXi
Flexible Deployment
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 offers unprecedented ease and flexibility of deployment, and provides you with two options to install the application:
- vmProtect 7 Virtual Appliance runs on ESX or ESXi host and does not require any additional hardware or Microsoft® Windows® license.
- vmProtect 7 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
Run Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 from VMware® vCenter™ and perform backup and recovery from the same interface you're already using to manage your virtual machines.
Alternatively, use vmProtect 7's intuitive web-based interface to remotely perform all backup and recovery tasks using any major web browser.
Faster, Smaller, More Efficient Backups
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 is designed to support 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, vmProtect7 reads data directly though the storage network, making the backup LAN-free.
Additionally, instead of copying entire virtual disk (.vmdk) files, Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 looks inside disks and volumes to analyze file systems and takes only blocks that are actually occupied by data. This allows vmProtect 7 to create backups much faster and smaller compared to what most competing products can, and even to exclude individual files and folders from a VM image backup.
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™ 7 automatically validates backups to ensure that all data is recoverable. Unlike competing products, vmProtect 7 reads and verifies every block of a backup ensuring that no data is corrupt.
All backups can be optionally 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 entire site is affected, including your backups?
To avoid data loss and ensure business recoverability for this scenario, companies have traditionally utilized one or another 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, a cost prohibitive scenario for SMBs and many enterprises.
Unlike other solutions on the market, Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 integrates seamlessly with Acronis Online Storage.
Acronis vmProtect Online is an optional subscription that stores your VM backups at highly secure offsite datacenter managed by Acronis. You don’t need to make any big 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 7 Online can be used separately or in combination with a vmProtect license, enabling you to use the vmProtect 7 Web-based interface to save VM backups to local, remote, or to Acronis Online Storage.
Hypervisors
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 can back up and recover virtual machines running on:
- VMware vSphere® v5, 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/23892.
- 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™ 7 can recover 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 7 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® 2008 /2008 R2 / 2003 / 2003 R2
- Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional / Ultimate
- Microsoft® Windows Vista® Business / Ultimate
- Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional SP2+
File Systems
Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 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 Online Storage
Comparison of Key Features in vmProtect and Acronis
Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition
| vmProtect 7 | Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition | Notes | |
| Installation / Deployment | |||
| Install on Windows |  | | |
| Install as Virtual Appliance | | | |
| Virtual Machines Supported | |||
| Agent-less backup of VMware vSphere 4 or vSphere 5 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 | | ||
| Scalability | |||
| Scalable up to | 1 - 100 VMs | Up to several thousand 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 | | ||
| Multi-destination and staging of backups | | ||
| Recovery | |||
| Run VM from backup without having to perform full restore | | ||
| Automatically restore to a stand-by VM when backup completes | | ||
| 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 (0.3 MB, PDF)
- User Guide (1.6 MB, PDF)
- Quick Start Guide (0.3 MB, PDF)
- Compare solutions with the Taneja Lab report (2.3 MB, PDF)
Acronis Inc. Backup software.