My, my I am excited.  I know that I do get excited about virtualisation related stuff regularly, but the same can certainly not be said about backup technology.  I have made an exception to my no excitement about backup rule after attending the hands-on lab for vCenter Data Recovery, outstanding!!

The best things often are the simplest and this tool is not complicated, but it just did exactly what most SMB businesses want from a backup solution and that is to work, without having to go to another vendor.

A few of the highlights as I saw:

• All managed through an extension to the vCenter Server GUI and completely integrated in a seamless way
• Destination volumes are encryptable
• SAN based backups
• ESX host integrated VCB
• Retention of backups is completely based on policies
  • Few – 7 most recent backups
  • Medium – 7 most recent backups, but kept for longer
  • Many – 15 most recent backups for a similar period to medium
  • Custom – Whatever you want them to be
• Schedule driven
• Multiple jobs can be run at once
• Restore jobs can run alongside backup jobs simultaneously
• Exclusions can be applied
• Restore rehearsal can restore a VM backup without overwriting the original
• Data-deduplication of backups is achieved by only backing up changes after the first full backup
• VSS leveraged using VMware Tools in Windows Virtual Machines

File level backups will be in the final release according to one of the VMware guys manning the lab and the documentation also alluded to this functionality.

I might be wrong, but it looked like it was all being driven by another CentOS JeOS Virtual Appliance, so VMware are staying true to their assertion that the future of software is through dedicated appliances!

Start as you mean to go on.

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