If you have virtualized infrastructure in your company, you must remember to periodically back up your virtual machines to safeguard the data and achieve compliance. However, choosing a particular backup solution is not always easy and straightforward. While there are some free backup solutions available, they usually come with a catch. This can be in the form of limited functionality, unreliable backups, or other similar shortcomings. For enterprise-level backup solutions, negative features are often manifested in high prices and “bulkiness” as you may not always have an IT team and environment that can handle such software. That’s why here at NAKIVO, our aim is to deliver the best of both worlds – a cost-effective, reliable, and lightweight solution suitable for any environment.
To illustrate our point, we are going to showcase how quick and easy it is to back up your VMs using NAKIVO Backup & Replication using VMware as an example.
Steps
Install NAKIVO Backup & Replication and log in
The solution takes only up to 2 minutes to install. Once done, log in using your credentials.
2. Add your vCenter or ESXi host to the inventory
Click the configuration tab and select Inventory. Click Add New and choose VMware vCenter or ESXi host. You’ll be prompted to enter the Display Name, Hostname or IP, Username, Password, and Web services port. Click Add at the bottom to proceed.
3. Create VMware VM Backup Job and choose VMs to back up
From the main UI of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, click Create and choose VMware vSphere Backup Job. Choose the VMs that you want to back up. You can either select separate VMs or the whole container (e.g., a host) at once. You can also choose to back up your VMs according to specific policies. These policies can automatically include VMs into the job based on specific criteria, such as the name or size of the VM. If you create a policy, then the new VMs matching the specific policy rules are going to be added to the job automatically; at the same time, non-matching VMs are going to be excluded.
4.Select repositories
At the second step, select a repository for the backups to be stored. You can also exclude disks you don’t need to be protected from the backup.
5. Configure scheduling
Next, either set up scheduling for the job or select the “Do not schedule, run on demand” option to make sure this job can only be activated manually. You have a wide range of options to select from, so you can be rather flexible with your scheduling if needed. You can also access the in-built dashboard calendar, which can help you better track your jobs.
6.Select the retention policy
At the next step, select your preferred retention policy for your backups. You can keep up to 1000 recovery points and rotate them on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
7. Configure the job options
At the last step, specify a name for your job and enable additional options, such as app-aware mode, screenshot verification, encryption, log truncation, execution of pre- and post-job scripts, etc. If you have limited bandwidth, you may also want to consider enabling bandwidth throttling.
Once you’re done, click Finish & Run. Once a job has started, you can track its progress in the Activities tab.
References