Virtual Machine Backup: Back Up and Restore Your Company Data With Ease

A virtual machine is the modern equivalent of a physical computer in an office. However, a virtual machine is exactly that — virtual, meaning it doesn’t exist. Modern businesses benefit a lot due to virtualization.

A big part of virtualization is a virtual machine backup. As a result, virtualization is a cost-effective model for performing computer-related tasks. In addition, virtualization cuts costs because there is no hardware, and VMs do not take up office space.

The only cost is the initial investment for setting up a server with sufficient computing resources. From there, you can install a hypervisor and create virtual machines for various tasks. Every person in your organization can use a virtual machine the same way as a desktop computer.

However, there is one glaring problem. Namely, how do you manage company data in virtual environments? Well, that’s where virtual machine backup and recovery come into play.

This guide will focus on the best practices to back up and restore your company data from virtual machines. So, with all that said, let’s start.

Best VM Backup and Recovery Practices

Organizations should implement the best backup practices for virtual environments to ensure continuous data protection and instant recovery. Of course, there are many ways to back up a virtual machine. But some are better than others.

This guide will outline a list of virtualization experts’ best practices. So, let’s start.

Back-Up Data at the Virtualization Layer

The first in the series of best VM backups is to backup data at the virtualization layer. Most standard backup techniques involve installing a backup agent on the VM level. This agent communicates with a backup server whenever we need to back up data from virtual machines.

However, VM-level backups consume computing resources, making your virtual environment less efficient. This is especially true if you manage multiple operating systems instead of a few. The unnecessary resource consumption can cause poor VM performance.

On the other hand, backups on the virtualization layer are more efficient as they don’t involve the guest or the host. Instead, the backup application backs up the virtual machine’s virtual disk file (vmdk), eliminating unnecessary resource consumption.

Use vStorage APIs for VMware Virtual Machines

vStorage APIs make managing your VMware virtual infrastructure backups easier to access, manage, and offload backup processing from the host. This means that vStorage APIs make backups faster and more efficient and allow for quicker incremental backups.

vStorage APIs are only available with a VMware backup. The technology is native to VMware vSphere virtual machines and can be a reliable backup solution. VMware backups with vStorage APIs come with a host of handy features that drastically ease the backup and recovery process.

Consider Third-Party Solutions

The SaaS (Software as a Service) model allows professionals to manage VMware backups using third-party tools. Third-party tools are always an option for protecting data from your virtual machines as they’re more effective.

Third-party VM backup software specializes in disaster recovery and data protection, effectively ensuring business continuity. These solutions can be the answer to all of your VM backup and recovery needs.

However, not every backup and recovery solution is made equal. Some are better than others. You will need to research the market and find the best solution for backing up your VMware virtual machine.

Don’t Mistake Snapshots for Backups

A virtual machine snapshot replicates your virtual machine at a specific time, as the snapshot captures the current state and data of your virtual machine. But do not mistake it for a reliable backup.

Instead, VM snapshots are intended as short-term solutions. But snapshots are also damaging for your virtual machines. How so? Well, snapshots cause a complete re-creation of your virtual disk. The recreation is deflected to a new delta disk file, and this file grows in size. It can eventually reach the size of the original disk, limiting disk space on the data store.

If you take snapshots of all VMs, you might find yourself in a position where there isn’t any space left on the data store. In that case, your VMs will shut down. In addition, merging snapshots can drastically affect the performance of your virtual machines.

So that begs the question, how do you use snapshots? Snapshots are important, and you should use them. However, you should delete snapshots as soon as you do not need them.

Schedule Backups

The final in our series of VM backup best practices is to schedule backups for virtual machines.

Suppose you’re planning on backing up your entire virtual environment. Have you considered that doing this could put serious stress on your computing resources? A smart way to schedule VM backups is to do it in groups.

If you have multiple hosts, backup VMs on one host at a time. The last thing you want is to cause a serious performance downgrade on your VMs. In addition, run a tesh schedule to see if there are any issues. Once everything comes back green, you can schedule backups for VMs on your hosts.

Conclusion

VM backups are essential for company data protection and disaster recovery. Each guest operating system in your virtual environment holds precious information that can be lost in many ways.

Therefore, a backup and recovery solution for your VMware environment is essential. We’ve given you several best practice tips to help you protect your data and keep your business running smoothly. Let us know if we should have included other VM backup best practices in our list.