Free VMware Backup Tools: Cost-effective Ways to Backup Your VMware VMs

The use of VMware in your data center might boost its productivity. If your host crashes, you need your hypervisor up and running as soon as possible. So, support that.

Virtual machines (VMs) on VMware virtualization infrastructure can be backed up using Mware backup solutions. In particular, this refers to the process of backing up and recovering virtual machines and their related data to guarantee the safety and accessibility of virtualized environments.

What Are My Choices for Backing Up VMware?

Any VMware storage solution must have data backup as a mandatory feature. Learn the ins and outs of the three basic methods for backing up VMware VMs (backup of VMs as physical machines, backup of VMDK files, and use of third-party virtualized backup solutions), as well as best practices for ensuring successful backups.

Multiple solutions exist, each with its own set of features and scalability choices, making it possible to meet the needs of a wide variety of settings and businesses.

Our Free VMware Backup is the most popular virtualization software on the market today. In terms of the number of businesses that have adopted virtualizations, its products rank first and second, respectively.

VMware is synonymous with both “virtualization” and “hypervisor.” Virtualization is the idea behind a piece of software called a hypervisor. The two expressions are synonymous in practice.

Since the hypervisor just has a mapping between the virtual and physical architectures, the concept of backing up virtualizations is somewhat malleable. When backing up a system, be sure to save all of the relevant data. Because most software is distributed on disks or as digital downloads, software piracy is uncommon. When software is reinstalled, however, users often lose their customizations. In addition, configuring a hypervisor can be time-consuming, so it’s inconvenient to have to start over if a physical server needs to be replaced due to damage.

VMware Data Protection

VMware backups can be either configuration copies or full data extractions from the machine that VMware represents. Taking a picture of the entire disk is as simple as logging into the VMware software or navigating to the structure that the hypervisor creates, and is necessary in any case.

Some VMware backup services claim they back up virtual servers, adding another layer of complexity to the search. Others, however, claim that they back up the entire hypervisor. Systems that claim to merely replicate the server are, in fact, saving the full hypervisor’s structure because no one would ever wish to just duplicate the server without also copying the virtual switches and VM mapping. But don’t assume that the backup tool will always replicate the VMware installation.

Ultimate VMware Data Protection

If you’re on the market for a reliable VMware backup solution, tailor your search to your specific system and backup needs. That is to say, you should decide whether you want software installed locally on your computer or in the cloud. Similarly, if you have a contract in place for your own cloud storage server, you should definitely use that instead. If possible, you should look for a system that incorporates cloud storage as part of the package.

BDRSuite is the comprehensive and most cost-effective VMware backup solution in the market that offers agentless backup, flexible scheduling & retention policies, supports storing backups locally or on cloud and more. BDRSuite’s Free Edition offers free VMware Backup for 10 VMs. Download BDRSuite and start VMware Backup 30-day free trial today.

Our process for picking a VMware backup program

We looked at available VMWare backup systems and compared them using the following criteria:

Having the option to simply save virtual host configurations

Compatibility with the built-in VMWare backup system

Retroactive updates

Reversing tampering can be done automatically.

A simple interface

A no-risk option to try before you buy, like a demo version or free trial.

Cost-effectiveness, as demonstrated by a reasonably priced backup and recovery service

Don’t ever rely on a snapshot as a backup.

Many people have made the wrong choice of relying on snapshots of their VMware VMs as backups. This can have severe results because VMware snapshots are not intended to replace regular backup procedures. VMware does not endorse using snapshots as backups, and the company makes no such claims. A snapshot is a transient point in time that can be used to reverse a virtual machine back to an earlier state, including all of its settings.

Conclusion

Snapshots are helpful in development environments because they allow for a fast rollback when testing changes to processes, patches, and other configurations. To accurately portray the current state of a virtual machine, VMware snapshots “chain” together the data from the basic VMDK disks and any other delta disks that may exist. So, the complete chain of disks is vulnerable to corruption if even one of them is compromised.

In contrast, backups provide an independent mechanism for storing and restoring data, independent of the underlying virtual disks or physical infrastructure. This is why snapshots should never replace regular backups.